Shelby’s race against time

Thursday, Nov. 24, 2005 | 8:39 a.m.

CARROLL SHELBY

ALTERNATIVE FUELS AND HYBRID ENGINES

Carroll Shelby said he built a hydrogen-powered Cobra five years ago just to prove it could be done. He delved into hybrid engines 20 years ago in Denver, but the endeavor didn't last long.

Politicians and environmentalists drove him out of that arena.

"I spent a couple of million dollars," Shelby said. "But after three years, I took my money out."

According to Shelby, compressed natural gas and hydrogen are two answers to the country"s reliance on foreign oil.

"But I've kind of got to prepare myself to go horizontal," he said. "I won't be a factor in it, anyway. My ideas won"t be followed, because it's terribly political. It's a big con game, and we're the butt of a joke.

"It's a mess, isn't it? But it's stupid to get upset. I'm no preacher."

THE OVERALLS

Hustling from his chicken farm to an east Texas track to get in some practice in August 1953, Shelby kept his striped bib overalls on to save time.

When his garb got more attention than his racing, he stuck with the look.

TWO STRIPES

Henry Ford II signed off on production of the Shelby Mustang GT350, with its trademark two blue stripes down the middle of a white body, in September 1964.

"At Le Mans, cars had stripes that were narrower," Shelby said. "I just told a guy to put some stripes on (the Mustang), and we just broadened them. Those are really international racing stripes, not Shelby stripes."

RACING VS. BUILDING

Shelby and co-driver Ray Salvadori steered an Aston Martin DBR1/300 to victory at Le Mans in June 1959, and Shelby spent the next few years in Europe.

Henry Ford II picked Shelby to lead his company"s racing program in the early 1960s, and the GT-40 Mark II finished first, second and third at Le Mans in June 1966.

A year later, Ford won Le Mans again with the Mark IV GT-40.

"I enjoyed driving race cars, but that wasn"t where I was trying to go," Shelby said. "I wanted to build my own car. In Europe, I hung around Aston Martin, Maserati and Ferrari, learning how they worked.

"Winning Le Mans (as a racer) helped me tremendously in later years, when I started building my own car, because of name recognition. It's the one race you want to win.

"I want that on my tombstone."

Carroll Shelby first passed through Las Vegas in 1948, with $22, three kids and a wife tucked inside his Willys Jeep Wagon.

"It took 12 hours to get to L.A. in that little ol' Willy," he said. "It was just one narrow road, through all those mountains. Every time I fly up there, I can't believe what it's become."

Shelby often played blackjack at the old Desert Inn, where Shelby's longtime Texas pal, Cecil Simmons, ran the gaming operations for Moe Dalitz.

On many occasions in the wee hours outside the casino, Dalitz would stab at cigarette butts on the ground with a broom stick that had a strategically placed nail on the end while regaling Shelby with his tales.

"Moe was one of the characters," Shelby said. "I loved Moe. I'd listen to his stories as he cussed out the custodians who never picked up those butts." Shelby, 82, will soon return to Las Vegas for good. Fed up with bureaucracy and taxes in California, he will move six companies, his fourth wife and himself to Southern Nevada.

"I'll be a permanent Nevada resident on Jan. 1," he said.

About 10 years ago Shelby constructed a 300,000-square-foot plant, where he builds retro Cobras, other limited-edition cars and custom parts, near Las Vegas Motor Speedway. I will serve as his headquarters.

Until then, he has a few doctors to see in Southern California. He had a heart transplant in 1990. The kidney a son gave him in '96 that began disagreeing with him four months ago has been doing well with a medication adjustment.

However, an associate said Shelby has been dealing with other health issues. After eight months of coaxing, Shelby recently agreed to a rare extensive telephone interview from his Southern California home in Bel Air.

"Yes, I've had a life," Shelby said. "I can't believe it myself. I'm very lucky and thankful, and I hope it ain't over ... I could go when I'm talking to you. "I'm just a lucky old turd."

That luck helped tremendously in November 1954. Shelby drove his Austin-Healey into a boulder, flipping the car four times, during the Carrera Pan Americana Mexico. He suffered broken bones, a shattered elbow, cuts and contusions.

"Oh, man, I can still see that thing," he said. "My eyes cross when I think of it. I wasn't all right."

A couple of New York schoolteachers, en route to Guatemala, happened by with a quart of brandy, then a few native Indians appeared with some Dos Equis beer.

Several hours after the accident, a World War II-era ambulance sped Shelby more than 100 miles to Oaxaca.

"I had half the horsepower of those Ferraris, but I was keeping up with them," he said. "I was going like hell. My fault. I just screwed up. Mexicans came by and stole the engine, wheels and instruments. When I picked it up, it was just a shell."

Shelby continued to race with his arm in a special fiberglass cast and his hand taped to the steering wheel.

In the first half of 1960, Shelby experienced his first chest pains at a friend's apartment in Dallas. He began treating dizzy spells and shortness of breath with nitroglycerin pills.

Doctors misdiagnosed the problem as "angina pectoralis," a condition in which the coronary arteries are starved for blood, instead of a heart-related problem.

Sports Illustrated's driver of the year in 1956 and '57 raced for the last time during the first week of December 1960 at the Los Angeles Times-Mirror Grand Prix, when he felt the ailment slowed him down too much.

The man whose parents -- and a host of aunts and uncles -- died from heart disease in their 40s reckoned time wasn't on his side.

"You got five years to build your car," Shelby told himself. "You won't live past that."

In June 1990, doctors stunned him after they transplanted into him the heart of a 38-year-old man who died after a brain aneurysm while throwing dice at the Las Vegas Hilton.

"Shelby, we've never seen a heart that's had at least 40 heart attacks," doctors told him. "Your heart was one big piece of scar tissue."

Six months later, Shelby learned the dead man's corneas, pancreas, liver, lungs and kidneys had also been donated to save other patients.

While Shelby lay in the hospital, a 12-year-old boy on his right and a 15-year-old boy on his left died while awaiting organs.

"I asked the old man upstairs, 'Get me a heart and I'll try to see that these kids didn't die for nothing,' " Shelby said.

"I try to live up to that every chance I get. If there's anything I get emotional and worked up over, it's organ donation."

The Carroll Shelby Children's Foundation is designed to help indigent children with heart or kidney problems. He figures he has helped at least 25 children around the world get transplants.

When a girl whom Shelby had assisted in obtaining a new liver began experiencing rejection problems in Bosnia six months ago, he contacted a high-ranking official in the United Nations to arrange another transplant for her in nearby Zagreb instead of London.

When he last checked, she was doing fine.

"Isn't that something?" Shelby said. "I get a good feeling when I do things like that. I wish it was morally possible to go hug that (38-year-old gambler's) wife, but it's against the rules."

From rave reviews it drew at the recent Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) convention in Las Vegas, Shelby is anticipating a great demand for the new Ford Shelby GT500 that will be out in June.

Developing options for that car, monitoring his elite batch of Tuli cattle at his east Texas ranch and keeping tabs on a new Aztec grain, with four times the nutritional value of corn, on 20 acres at that ranch will keep Shelby busy.

"I'm always getting into something like that," he said of the new grain, "that usually gets me into trouble."

Through February, when Simmons died at age 95, Shelby had been visiting Las Vegas two or three times a week. Permanently moving to his Green Valley home, he believes, will bring back memories of Dalitz and Simmons.

Shelby had been taking care of Simmons, who lived at the Las Vegas Country Club, the way Simmons took care of Dalitz, who died in 1989.

"Moe had Alzheimer's, and Cecil took such good care of Moe," Shelby said. "He took Moe to the country club for lunch twice a week when Moe didn't know where he was. I tried to do a little bit of that for Cecil."

Shelby hopes he can receive his favorite radio show, which starts at 10 p.m. and delves in life after death, extra-terrestrials and nanotechnology, in Las Vegas.

Mention him as a legend, though, and Shelby bristles.

"I don't pay attention to that (stuff)," he said. "I'm so busy making up something to make life interesting that I don't have time to get into that. I don't ever think about it. It's something someone else writes about.

"I have a lot of problems making things work that I dream about, so I don't have time to think of (stuff) like that.

"I just need to live to be 1,000 years old to get this done."

Rob Miech can be reached at 259-4087 or miech@lasvegassun.com

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