Carroll Shelby and His Cars

Representing Shelby's involvement with other Ford-powered competition vehicles is a 1965 GT350 Mustang painstakingly modified at Shelby American. One of them on display was used in the Carroll Shelby School of High Performance Driving (later sold to race driver Bob Bondurant, who renamed the school).


After making his indelible mark in the history of motorsports with Ford, Shelby was lured away to develop a number of Mopar-powered sports cars, including the turbocharged GLH (which he claimed stood for "Goes Like Hell") and the GLHS ("Goes Like Hell Some More"). Only 500 of the latter model, which is on display in the exhibit, were ever produced. In 1990 Shelby also developed a Dodge-powered CAN-AM spec racecar. His collaboration with Chrysler culminated in the Dodge Viper. The model shown here is one of the early pilot versions.

Series 1
A crowning achievement in Shelby's life is the development of the Shelby Series I, powered by an Oldsmobile V-8. This association with GM and Oldsmobile meant that Shelby is the first person ever to be involved in the development of performance cars for all of the Big Three automakers. Today, at the age of 80, Carroll Shelby remains active overseeing the day-to-day activities of Carroll Shelby International, which designs and engineers specialty and high-performance cars. Remarkably, among its many interests is the ongoing manufacture of Shelby Cobras, the legendary sports car that first made Shelby famous more than four decades ago.