Ford Shelby GT500 a demon 200 mph speed

Dan Carney
By Dan Carney, msnbc.com of mysteries

Two hundred miles per hour. This is the realm of the Indy cars. A handful of ultra-exotic sports cars have reached also the standard, but their price tags most of them make as unreachable as an IndyCar.

So when Ford hot rod tuner in the special vehicles team of the late Carroll Shelby would said that 2013 200 mph reach Ford Shelby GT500, he could believe it, hardly. Shelby, who won the 24-hour sports car race in Le Mans as a driver, team manager and car builder, knew that doubled four times takes the power the speed of 100 km/h to 200 km/h.

In fact, after an initially dizzy reaction of the news, Shelby - whose health was then precarious - began to suspect, the guys might be, trying to send it with a smile on his face, off. Taking into account the difficulties in achieving actual 200 mph in a production Mustang with a list price from $54,000, called Shelby Chief Engineer Jamal Marzooqi with a question. "You were me not bull@!$%#ting about the 200 mph, were you?" Shelby growled, remembered Marzooqi.

He was not. Ford's test driver included the nardo test track in Italy an official top speed of 202. In a factory-built Mustang.
Car and driver Magazine technical writer Don Schroeder in the year 2000 died trying 200 mph in a modified Mercedes-Benz on a similar test track in Texas. Over 150 km/h not more cars are pure land vehicles and move into the realm of low-flying aircraft.

In the introduction of Ford was worried much media of the GT500 on the race track road, Atlanta, Georgia about the amazing speed potential. The test vehicles were equipped with roll bars and five-point harnesses racing. In addition, speed just limited by a wall of the PIN on the back, forced a stop of about 155 mph. And we were ever drive on the front just prevents.

Nevertheless, it was enough to amazing makes the car to experience. And its even more amazing ability to meter, the power out and put it on the floor get. Certainly, until Ford introduced the boss 302 last year, it gave out nothing that the company charged stall corral was the incredible 662 horses in the GT500.

But the car is docile on the street to betray with only a slightly stiffer clutch pedal, the extra power under the hood. This is absolutely a car who can drive a manual transmission could use for commuters, without feeling by a stiff suspension beaten together to work.

You can many tricks like a two discs clutch Pack pedal on the reasonable, electronically switchable shock absorbers, decide which change according to driving conditions and a three-tier adjustable power steering arrangement, for keeping the clutch you how difficult it is to turn the wheel.

That clutch Pack the destructive power can withstand output while repeated drag strip started, an activity approved by an electronic start control system, which allows the driver to set the engine speed to a pre-programmed - I had released good luck with 3,700 rpm - if the clutch to start the car.

An experienced drag racer passed the quarter-mile in 11.7 seconds, while was my best time for the day of 12.4 seconds with 120 km/h. The Shelby used a beautiful new six-speed manual shifter, which somehow necessary, marries the short throws and low cost of a Mazda Miata lever with the strong transmission elements to the immense power of the GT500 survive.

The short throws make it possible to change gears, it is difficult that clutch fast enough work to keep up on the one or two Upshift so quickly on the drag strip. Many journalists crunched the gear change just because she had pressed the clutch yet not when they second the shifter in the gear jammed. OK, one of the guilty I was, but only once.

On the winding road circuit proved the GT500 align its ability to changes in direction and accelerate from corners faster than a political candidate flee a voting record. The credit some tires specifically designed goes to the Goodyear supercar G2 to treat this car to 200 km/h top speed.

Despite his huge Brembo brakes the Mustang is too slow mass significantly, if there is time, the car. Hammers in some of which induced slow corners, even after the abbreviated straight, Road Atlanta late braking brake fade as the pedal for the ground Dove, and I have to slow down the car Downshifting. The car needed probably only bled the brake fluid, is the standard race service track between meetings.

But it only a few places, where the ability of 200 mph stop matter are, is because there are only a few places, large enough for the GT500 this speed to reach. You should flats, are planning a summer vacation together with speed weeks on the Bonneville Salt give it a go, and you must not slow down it.

Although I still I now enough dangers not in a position to verify whether the GT500 to go 200 mph, had personally confirm it, I want to give it a try. Until then we have to Ford's right to trust, that the car will do it. And I don't think they are us bull@!$%#ting.

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Carroll Shelby, muscle-car legend, dies at 89

Kevin Winter / Getty Images

Auto racing legend Carroll Shelby in 2009.

Carroll Shelby, the legendary car designer and champion auto racer who built the fabled Shelby Cobra sports car and injected testosterone into Ford's Mustang and Chrysler's Viper, has died. He was 89.

Shelby was one of the nation's longest-living heart transplant recipients, having received a heart on June 7, 1990, from a 34-year-old man who died of an aneurism. Shelby also received a kidney transplant in 1996 from his son, Michael.

The 1992 inductee into the Automobile Hall of Fame had homes in Los Angeles and his native east Texas.

The one-time chicken farmer had more than a half-dozen successful careers during his long life. Among them: champion race car driver, racing team owner, automobile manufacturer, automotive consultant, safari tour operator, raconteur, chili entrepreneur and philanthropist.

"He's an icon in the medical world and an icon in the automotive world," his longtime friend, Dick Messer, executive director of Los Angeles' Petersen Automotive Museum, once said of Shelby.

"His legacy is the diversity of his life," Messer said. "He's incredibly innovative. His life has always been the reinvention of Carroll Shelby."

Shelby first made his name behind the wheel of a car, winning France's grueling 24 Hours of Le Mans sports car race with teammate Ray Salvadori in 1959. He already was suffering serious heart problems and ran the race "with nitroglycerin pills under his tongue," Messer once noted.

Chris Hondros / Getty Images

Carroll Shelby poses with the 2007 Ford Shelby Mustang GT-H in 2006.

He had turned to the race-car circuit in the 1950s after his chicken ranch failed. He won dozens of races in various classes throughout the 1950s and was twice named Sports Illustrated's Driver of the Year.

Soon after his win at Le Mans, he gave up racing and turned his attention to designing high-powered "muscle cars" that eventually became the Shelby Cobra and the Mustang Shelby GT500.

The Cobra, which used Ford engines and a British sport car chassis, was the fastest production model ever made when it was displayed at the New York Auto Show in 1962.

AP

Carroll Shelby sits in his race car in 1964.

A year later, Cobras were winning races over Corvettes, and in 1964 the Rip Chords had a Top 5 hit on the Billboard pop chart with "Hey, Little Cobra." ("Spring, little Cobra, getting ready to strike, spring, little Cobra, with all of your might. Hey, little Cobra, don't you know you're gonna shut 'em down?")

In 2007, an 800-horsepower model of the Cobra made in 1966, once Shelby's personal car, sold for $5.5 million at auction, a record for an American car.

"It's a special car. It would do just over three seconds to 60 (mph), 40 years ago," Shelby told the crowd before the sale, held in Scottsdale, Ariz.

It was Lee Iacocca, then head of Ford Motor Co., who had assigned Shelby the task of designing a fastback model of Ford's Mustang that could compete against the Corvette for young male buyers.

Turning a vehicle he had once dismissed as "a secretary car" into a rumbling, high-performance model was "the hardest thing I've done in my life," Shelby recalled in a 2000 interview with The Associated Press.

AP

Carroll Shelby, after winning the 200-mile International Grand Prix at the Riverside Raceways, in California in 1960.

That car and the Shelby Cobra made his name a household word in the 1960s.

When the energy crisis of the 1970s limited the market for gas-guzzling high-performance cars, Shelby weathered the downturn by heading to Africa, where he operated a safari company for a dozen years.

By the time he had returned to the United States, Iacocca was running Chrysler Motors and he hired him to design the supercharged Viper sports car.

In the meantime, Shelby had also inaugurated the World Chili Cookoff competition and he began marketing Carroll Shelby Original Texas Chili.

In recent years, Shelby worked as a technical adviser on the Ford GT project and designed the Shelby Series 1 two-seat muscle car, a 21st century clone of his 1965 Cobra.

AP

The Mustang GT 350, is shown in this March 1965 file photo. The sleek fastback built by Carroll Shelby attracted high interest among sports car enthusiasts.

"I just wanted to see if I could do it one more time after a heart transplant and a kidney transplant," he once told the AP.

In 1990 he had marketed the Can-Am Spec Racer, an affordable racing car for entry-level drivers.

He created the Carroll Shelby Children's Foundation in 1991 to provide assistance for children and young people needing acute coronary and kidney care. According to its website, the foundation has helped numerous children receive needed surgery, as well as provided money for research.

Carroll Hall Shelby was born Jan. 11, 1923, in Leesburg, Texas.

During World War II he was an Army Air Corps flight instructor who corresponded with his fiancee by dropping love letters stuck into his flying boots onto her farm.

After leaving the military in 1945, he started a dump truck business, then decided to raise chickens. The poultry business initially flourished, with Shelby earning a $5,000 profit on the first batch of broilers he delivered. He went broke, however, when his second flock died of disease.

A friend then invited him to become an amateur racer and his success led to his joining the Aston-Martin team and competing in races all over the world.

Shelby is survived by his three children, Patrick, Michael and Sharon; his sister Anne Shelby Ellison; and his wife, Cleo.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

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Shelby leaves behind smokin' legend of sports cars

Courtesy of Shelby American, Inc

Carroll Shelby behind the wheel of a Cobra, the wickedly fast car that he designed.

So death finally overtook cantankerous ol’ Shel. It was a hell of a contest, begun in the 1950s, when Carroll Shelby, who went on to fame and fortune as a sports-car builder, had to take nitroglycerin tablets while driving race cars to keep his iffy heart pumping.

He drove hard almost until the end. At the media introduction of the Shelby GT500 at the New York Auto Show in 2005, I asked how things were going at home in Texas. Not good, he said. The then-82-year-old had just gotten a speeding ticket. “Them sumbitches down in Texas are gettin’ as bad as the sumbitches in California,” he growled.

Against stiff odds, he made it to 1990 with his weak heart before getting a donor's heart that finally quit nearly a quarter-century later. In 1996, his son donated Shelby a kidney. There was a time when the two threatened to scavenge spare body parts from anyone who had the misfortune to expire on the premises of the Shelby American Inc. shop in Las Vegas.

Shelby was best known for his eponymous sports cars, most particularly the fearsome 427 Cobra, a car that resulted from mating a big-block 427-cubic-inch Ford V8 engine with the chassis and bodywork of a diminutive English sports car, the AC Ace. Over the years Shelby’s car production evolved from the original Cobra line to include the GT350 and GT500, which were modified Ford Mustangs.

For a time in the 1980s he sold hot-rodded, turbocharged Chrysler economy cars – their “GLH” moniker stood for “Goes Like Hell” -- that were the precursors of the sport-compact-car movement epitomized by customized Honda Civics.

Shelby also pioneered the modern notion of intellectual property protection and licensing, spawning simultaneous industries licensing his name and designs on the one hand, and sending lawyers after unlicensed knockoffs on the other.

While this earned him a reputation for seeking credit where it might not have been due, I found just the opposite while researching a book on the Dodge Viper sports car. He didn’t want credit for others’ work, only credit -- and payment -- for his own.

Shelby was frequently credited for contributing to the Viper, which was an overt homage to his original Cobra, down to its serpent-inspired name. But he said he had done nothing to help design or build the car, except intercede on the car’s behalf with his longtime collaborator at Ford and Chrysler, then-Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca.

“I said, ‘I’ll go talk to Iacocca,’ because he had been turning us down for a long time,” Shelby recalled. “So we bulls---ted him that we could do it for about $20 million. He OK’d it, but I had to meet with him and tell him we were on budget – until we got enough money in it he couldn’t back out.”

But you don’t typically plop down on the scene in an industry like the car business and achieve success without some credentials, and Shelby had them. What did Shelby do? What didn’t he do?

He was a pilot during World War II, but spent the war stateside because they made him an instructor. In the '50s he was a three-time U.S. champion sports car racer, drove for the Aston Martin team in Europe and won the prestigious 24 Hours of Le Mans race as a driver. Sports Illustrated twice named him “Driver of the Year.”

During this time he earned his reputation as the racing chicken rancher, when he sped from tending his animals directly to a race, and drove still wearing his bib overalls.

He was forced from the cockpit by his heart problems in 1960 and moved on to car building, producing the first Cobra in 1962 after cutting his first deal with Iacocca when he was at Ford.

In addition to building and selling sports cars, Shelby’s company also raced them, developing the Cobra Daytona Coupe derivative of the open-top Cobra roadster and then the dominant Ford GT40. The latter was a weapon specifically devised by Ford and wielded by Shelby for the purpose of defeating Enzo Ferrari’s red sports cars at Le Mans in a cost-is-no-object campaign fueled by Henry Ford II’s ego and money. Shelby’s team won in 1966 and ’67.

Shelby’s cars were so popular in the mid-‘60s that in 1966 you could rent a Shelby GT-350H from Hertz. Bill Cosby was the car-nut Jerry Seinfeld equivalent of that era, driving a custom-built Cobra that he worked into his comedy routine as the “200 miles per hour” bit.

The ‘70s weren’t kind to cars or racing, and Shelby collected a fat check from Ford in exchange for the opportunity for the company to bastardize Shelby’s legacy with atrocities like the 1978 Mustang II King Cobra.

Shelby returned to his Texas roots and in a move that pre-dated Paul Newman’s popular line of celebrity foods, launched his Carroll Shelby’s Original Texas Brand Chili Preparation mix in 1976.

After receiving a transplanted heart in 1990, Shelby founded the Carroll Shelby Heart Fund, a charity to help children get heart transplants. He called the foundation his most important work.

Author A.J. Baime spent significant time with Shelby researching his book on the Shelby Le Mans races, “Go Like Hell.” “He contributed so much to so many — his cars, his charity, his victories against all odds,” Baime remembered. “I feel lucky to have known him. In the cars that bear his name and in the lore of the greatest motorsport victories in the history of the USA, he will live on forever.”

On May 10, 2012, 89 years after his birth in 1923, Shelby’s second heart finally stopped.

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Shelby rolls out a 950-horsepower Mustang

The Detroit Bureau

The Shelby 1000 makes 950 hp on the street, 1,100 on the track.

By Paul A. Eisenstein, The Detroit BureauWhen Carroll Shelby says he’s got a new muscle car on tap, take him seriously.  The legendary automotive raconteur’s latest take on the Mustang will deliver enough tire-squealing torque and horsepower to make gold-chained Ferraristas duck for cover.

That’s 950 hp, to be precise, only slightly less than the $1.4 million Bugatti Veyron ultracar makes.  And that’s for the street legal version of the Shelby 1000 that will take its bow at the New York Auto Show next week.  The track-ready pony car bumps the number all the way up to 1,100 horsepower.

Since the former race car driver-cum-automotive entrepreneur first teamed up with Lee Iacocca, back in the mid-‘60s, Shelby has never shied away from the challenge of pumping a little more power out of a Mustang.  The latest offering takes things one very large step beyond the last Mustang upgrade from Shelby American, the GT500 Super Snake “only” able to make a measly 800 hp.

Says Shelby American CEO John Luft, the Shelby 1000 targets “anybody who has need for speed.”

Make that anybody who has the need – and the bank account to put that power to the pavement.  The street version of the Shelby 1000 will set you back $149,995.  That doesn’t cover speeding tickets, insurance – or the 2012 Shelby GT500 you’ll need to own in the first place.

The GT500 rolls off a conventional Ford assembly line and will cost you a seemingly paltry $48,810.  But then you ship or drive it out to the Nevada desert, about 20 miles from Las Vegas, where Shelby American runs a conversion shop.

What eventually rolls out may look a lot like what you came in with but there’s really not much left over from the original car.  The factory-stock 5.4-liter V-8 is completely torn down and reassembled using new rods, piston and crankshaft.  About the only thing left is the original block.

Other updates focus on improved handling and stopping capabilities with 6 pistons in front and 4 pistons in the rear, while the suspension includes new struts, sway bars and bushings.  The new solid driveshaft is connected to a 9-inch rear end.  Exterior cues incorporate aerodynamics while maintaining a stealthy appearance.  The hood, rear panel and splitter are functional pieces.

The Shelby 1000 project was launched almost on a whim, the 89-year-old Carroll Shelby pronouncing his desire to build a Mustang with 1,000 horsepower.  Luft and his team have long known better than to say no.

“Carroll Shelby is a visionary who has pushed the boundaries of performance his entire life,” said Luft.  “He challenged the Shelby American team to develop the Shelby 1000 and wanted to unveil this amazing new Shelby at the New York Auto Show celebrating 50 years since he unveiled the very first Shelby Cobra that changed the face of high performance.”

Both the very first Shelby Cobra and the first Shelby 1000 will be on display at the upcoming NY Auto Show.

It’s no surprise Shelby American has designated the more powerful model for track use only, but what sort of road might one run a “street” car making 950 hp down?  Not a problem, Luft suggested to USA Today’s Chris Woodyard, insisting that in traffic, the Shelby 1000 is “stealth and below the radar.”

Shelby American plans to produce about 1,000 of the monsters, which are more like Clydesdales than ponies.  According to Luft, about a quarter of them have already been claimed.

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