Shelby American Focuses on the Entire Life of Shelby [REVIEW]

Carroll Shelby’s car company, Shelby American, has been the subject of a lot of attention lately with the release of the drama Ford V Ferrari and the celebration of Ford’s four first place finishes at Le Mans 50-years-ago. The documentary movie Shelby American is an attempt to shed more light on Carroll Shelby and his life in particular rather than focusing on just one of the many adventures and turns in Shelby’s life.  

Shelby American is a fairly long documentary, but it does take a while to describe the entire life of one of the most active and eccentric 89-year-olds ever, so a run time of 2 hours isn’t too bad all things considered. The documentary doesn’t dwell for long on Shelby’s early life except to pause and celebrate Shelby’s patriotism during WWII. After talking about his life as a pilot, foray into the dump truck business and almost successful chicken farm, it seems Shelby miraculously started driving racecars and also started winning at the same time.

I’m not sure if it was actually a miraculous discovery for Shelby or if the documentary just skips that part of his life, but it’s believable that Shelby stumbled upon his driving skill considering his scrappy nature.

The documentary also pays little attention to Shelby’s career at Aston Martin where he won his first 24 Hours of Le Mans as a driver, making him the first American to ever win the most prestigious race in the world of endurance road racing. However, they do include the detail about how Shelby won a race with a broken arm by taping his hand to the steering wheel, proving his indisputable gumption.  

After his success at Aston Martin, Shelby decided he wanted build a car with an American engine that could win at Le Mans against the Europeans. Obviously, this was an extremely challenging goal for a chicken farmer with pretty much no money, but like any entrepreneur with half-baked ethics, he managed to convince AC to give him some cars to put the V8 engines he practically stole from Ford. Afterall, AC was having problems securing an engine supplier for their own cars and Ford needed a car with their name on it that could be Zora Duntov’s Corvette.  

Shelby used the one car that Shelby American built as a press-car for reviews on the launch of their first road car, but to make it seem like Shelby American was a larger company than it actually was, Shelby painted it a different color every time it went out to a new journalist. Most journalists thought they were each getting a new car to test, making it seem like Shelby American could just churn out Cobra’s like there was no tomorrow. However, Carroll Shelby had a habit, for better or worse, of peacocking when it came to selling his goods and making deals. No doubt he knew how to win races and build sport cars, but what he arguably knew better was how to get the funds to do so.

The most interesting part of this documentary compared to Ford V. Ferrari was the attention to detail on the development of both Shelby American’s Cobra cars and the GT40 program. The amount of time spent interviewing the people who were actually involved in the development of both cars gives great insight into one of the most important times of Shelby’s life. The interviews also give some great stories of drama between major players in the motorsports world of the 1960’s.  

One big thing I feel this documentary got wrong was their portrayal of Ferrari during the Ford battle with Ferrari. Several members of the Ford family, direct descendants of Henry “The Deuce” Ford II and other important people at Ford Motor Co., were interviewed about how the whole deal between Ferrari and Ford went down, but there were probably less than five minutes devoted to interviews with Ferrari employees during the entire two hour long movie.

The Ford family members describe the whole deal as a ploy by Ferrari to up the bid to buy out Ferrari from Fiat, but many historians with less bias describe the event differently. Enzo Ferrari specifically had qualms with the part of the contract Ford arranged where it limited Enzo’s autonomy with his racing team. Even if Enzo used Ford’s bid on his company to leverage a better bid from Fiat, that’s business. Racing and business are not kind worlds.

Ford also intended to purchase Ferrari to basically use the brand identity and pedigree built by Enzo Ferrari’s racing efforts to sell more boring passenger cars in the United States. By purchasing the best sportscar manufacturer in the world and using some quick marketing strategies to correlate the performance offered by Ferrari’s cars with the ordinary passenger cars offered by Ford.  

Ferrari engineers would also theoretically give their expertise to develop a Ford road car that outperforms Corvette on the racetrack and on the sales floor. The notion that Ferrari was using Ford, but Ford would not use Ferrari if their deal went through is bogus.

Beyond the Le Mans victories, the documentary shows some of the interesting aspects of Shelby’s life, including his health troubles, development of new cars and key role at Chrysler.

Overall, this documentary is definitely worth a watch if you’re more interested in the life of Carroll Shelby than the Ford V Ferrari dialogue. Just keep the bias from Ford in the dialogue in the back of your mind when you watch it. There are many other perspectives on the events of Shelby’s life as an American icon than this documentary presents.