Auto Racing: Beware the Blue Cabra

Each year, Italy’s Automaestro Enzo Ferrari brings his high-whining, finely tuned racing instruments to Florida for the Sebring Twelve Hour Endurance Race. Each year, with splendid monotony, they mop up everything but the oil on the track. When onetime Racing Driver Carroll Shelby decided in 1961 to challenge the master with a cannibalized machine of his own devising — a brutish Ford engine* jammed into a bulging A.C. Bristol body — the Monster of Maranello smiled a fine Italian smile. Last year on this concrete and blacktop track, three of the six Shelby Cobras entered broke down; highest Cobra fin ish was a low eleventh. Two months ago at Daytona, the best a Cobra could do was to place fourth.

Fortnight ago, Ferrari came again to Sebring and the master’s entourage, with condescending eyes, looked over this year’s Shelby Cobra. “This won’t be a contest — for sure,” one Ferrari expert predicted on the eve of the race. “Shel by can’t put all that power to the road. The more power he gives the cars, the worse they handle.” When the grueling, twelve-hour ordeal had ended, the Italians were hardly singing Un Bel Di. Ferrari’s electric-red cars were in the top three places overall — first this year as they have been for the past three years, and for five of the last six. All three had broken the Sebring distance-covered record that Ferrari, of course, had established three years ago. The winning Ferrari set a new average speed record of 92.364 miles per hour; the third car set a new lap record of close to 101 m.p.h. over the brutal 5.2-mile claw-shaped maze of airport runways and interchanges.

It was the same old story — or was it? Holding Together. Hardly. Auto racing, like one-design yachting, has to be judged in terms of classes. When unequal cars race together on the same track, the first cars in do not always run off with the highest honors. The winning Ferraris were all prototypes, sleek, custom-made machines unlike any other cars in the world. Their victory had been conceded before the starting flag went down. But the other Ferraris, regular Grand Touring class models, were all struck down by Shelby’s production-line Cobras.

The night before, Shelby, a tall, bold, wreck-scarred Texan, outlined a simple strategy for the race. Nine Cobras were to tool along at 6,000 r.p.m., fast enough to place respectably, but slow enough to keep from breaking down on a track that demands 28 grating changes of gear to get through a single lap. The other two cars would bear down hard and stay in front of Ferrari’s G.T.s at any cost—for as long as they held together.

“Let’s Go.” Came the race, and at 50 laps tense Cobra pitmen watched four Ferrari prototypes scream past the yellow trackside pylons, locked in the lead. But behind them on Sebring’s blazing 100° track boomed a blue Cobra coupe followed by two open cockpit Cobra roadsters. Not a single Ferrari Gran Turismo went by among the first ten cars.

The laps went by, hour on hour, and still the clutch of Cobras held together. Down the straight they roared: lead Cobra in the delicate hands of deft Bob Holbert; behind him, the brilliant Dan Gurney; in the open cockpit behind him, the helmeted head of former World Champion Phil Hill.

In the pits, Shelby’s competition manager Ken Miles flashed a crooked grin. “We’ve had a year’s experience since we were here last,” he allowed cautiously. “You learn a lot in a year.” Afternoon turned to twilight. Gurney’s Cobra thundered past, and Miles’s watch said 3 min., 23 sec. for the lap. “We can hold our places,” he said. Moments later, a Cobra pulled in for a pit stop, and Miles’s smile snapped off. Mechanics leaped frantically to find the proper wrench while the driver screamed, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” Then as a mechanic gave a moving wheel lug a last resounding whack with his steel hammer, the Cobra groaned out of the pit.

Wrecked Hope. It was pitch black when Phil Hill pulled into the Cobra pit. Shelby shuffled over. “Just finish, now. Just finish,” he implored. Said Miles: “Anything can happen in the last hour.”

He was right. At 192 laps, Gurney’s Cobra, with co-Driver Bob Johnson at the wheel, began to move up on the third-place Ferrari prototype. The big Cobra was only two laps behind and closing swiftly when it happened. An Alfa Romeo, sputtering with a faulty drive shaft, was limping in front of him, tail lights out. Johnson, going full bore down the darkened straightaway, never saw him. Suddenly the Alfa veered erratically. It burst into flames when the Cobra struck it; the Cobra rolled over three times. Miraculously, Johnson got away with minor cuts and a lump under his eye, but the wreck killed Shelby’s hopes of squeaking in among Ferrari prototypes.

Aristocrat v. Parvenu. It mattered little when time ran out. Led by the Holbert coupe, a car so hot it burned blisters on the feet of co-Driver Dave McDonald, five Shelby Cobras roared home in the top ten overall places, and one-two-three in the sought-after Grand Touring Class, thereby edging ahead of Ferrari in the world championship for G.T. manufacturers. And they finally proved that Shelby’s cars are not only fast. They last.

While Ferraris are still far and away the world’s finest road-racing machines, Shelby argues that, with Ford’s technological resources at his disposal, he will eventually produce the faster car in any class. But the Texan still has a long way to go. At least three major races, the Targa Florio, Nurburgring, and the brutal 24-hour test at Le Mans, must come before the championship is decided. Not just the title, but the traditions and philosophy of auto racing are at stake. The Italian’s cars are the design of an artist in steel; the cheapest production model costs $8,800. Shelby’s Cobras cost $6,000; their engines and bodies are products of assembly-line techniques. Either the hand-crafted aristocrat or the mass-produced parvenu will ultimately prove superior. The answer rests with time on a blackened track.

*The basic Fairlane 340-h.p. V8, hyped to 375 h.p., equipped with Italian carburetors, special camshaft and other modifications.