The innovative engineer talks about Corvettes, Cobras, 240Zs and more
Peter Brock designed the Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray at 21 before masterminding the Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupé – but first he had to overcome the defeatists
When I was 12 years old, our next door neighbour in Sausalito, Northern California had a right-hand-drive MG TC,’ recalls former car designer Peter Brock. ‘I used to go to the races with him in a convoy with a load of other MGS. I just couldn’t wait until I would be able to have my own MG. I eventually bought one when I was 15. It had a blown engine but those MG guys helped me to get it running, so, by the time I got my driving license at 16, I was driving my own TC.’ At high school the focus was hot rods, so, he sold the MG and bought a ’46 Ford. ‘I chopped it, channeled it and sectioned it, fitted a Cadillac engine, a ’38 Le Salle gearbox, named it the ‘Fordillac’ and managed to win the Oakland Roadster Show – the biggest car show for hot rods at that time – two years running.’
Brock went to Stanford University to read engineering but he hated it. ‘I loved cars and wanted to go to the Art Center College of Design in Southern California to study car design. I bought Ken Purdy’s book, The Kings of the Road and became totally absorbed by automotive design. I learned what the Germans had been doing in the Thirties and what the Italians were doing currently and just filled my head with names of designers that most people had never even heard of. I was halfway through college when I quit and drove my hot-rod Ford all the way down to that school in LA. I walked in through a back door and sneaked in on a couple of classes. I knew immediately it was what I wanted to do so I went to the office to enroll. They told me I had to present my portfolio to the approval board. I said, “What’s a portfolio?” They replied that if I didn’t have a portfolio, I should go away. I went back to my car and for two hours drew cars in a ring binder, then walked back inside. They told me I couldn’t do that! I said, “Well I’ve done it! Here’s the money, now sign me up. Amazingly, they agreed but told me I had six months and if I wasn’t approved by the instructors I’d have to leave. I was in but my parents were very disappointed and said I would not get any more money. We didn’t speak for seven years.
‘I had met Chuck Jordan [later vice-president of General Motors design] when he came out to the school looking for students to headhunt, so I asked if he could get me in as a GM intern. Amazingly, he said, “Peter, there will be an airplane ticket for you tomorrow.” The next day they hired me in. That was 1956, I was 19 and the youngest GM designer.
‘Following the Automobile Manufacturers’ Association racing ban of April 1957, GM had killed off the Corvette C1 racing project. But when Bill Mitchell took over as vice president for design, he was determined to continue it. He kept his program secret by working with me and the young intern designers in the Research B Advanced Concept Studio. One day he walked in and said, “You’ve all been told that the Corvette programme has been killed off. Well, it’s not. We are going to build a new Corvette. I can’t do it upstairs officially, so I am counting on you guys to give me something that will blow everyone’s socks off.”
A few days later, he was back, looking at the sketches we’d put up all over the walls. He stopped in front of one and asked who’d done it. I told him it was me, to which he replied, “OK. This is the best interpretation of my theme. Make a better sketch and an improved version along those lines.”
‘The following week he was back, saying, “OK, so who did this?” Again, I said it was me, “Right Peter, then from now you’re in charge of this program. This will be our new car, XP87, and it will be a coupé just as you’ve drawn it.”’
‘Shelby got the contract; now I was racing against him. I developed the hot 240Zs and blew his doors off’
At 21 years old, Peter Brock became the leader of the new covert Corvette programme called Sting Ray. When it appeared in public it received so much press that GM management decided to make a production version after all. Larry Shinoda and Tony Lapine took Brock’s project and turned it into the production Corvette Sting Ray that appeared in 1963 and made a hero out of Bill Mitchell.
Brock had always wanted to be a racing driver but had to wait until he turned 21 in 1958 to apply for his SCCA race licence, ‘I left GM and went back to California where I worked on Max Balchowsky’s ‘Old Yeller’ cars during the day and my own 1953 ex-le Mans, two-seat Cooper Climax team car at night. It was then that I got to know Carroll Shelby and when he opened his School for High Performance Driving at Riverside Raceway he asked me to run it, I was Shelby’s very first employee.’
When the first Cobra was built, Brock tested it at Riverside. His goal was to have a seat in the Cobra at its first race and Shelby promised him the drive, but ultimately chose Billy Kraus because he was more experienced, even though Brock was quicker. The Cobra had proved so much faster than the then-new Corvette, every top driver wanted to drive it. ‘Shelby said, “Sorry kid, I’ve got the best in the world waiting in line.”’
Brock continued running the school as well as designing parts for the Shelby Mustang, Shelby’s other racing cars and even the company logos. After the team won the US Road Racing Championship in 1963, Shelby decided to go back to Europe and take on Ferrari. Peter pointed out that while the Cobra was fantastic on American tracks, it was only good for 160mph. ‘I told him that if you double the speed from 100mph to 200mph, the drag goes up by the square. To compete with Ferrari, we had to have better aerodynamics. We needed a new body for the Cobra.
‘At General Motors I used to spend my lunchtimes in the new Tech Centre library and one day, I came across a sheaf of papers in German tucked inside a book. I don’t think that anyone had ever looked at them. There were some line drawings; I was able to understand the mathematics and the numbers. It was a comparison in drag on automobile shapes from the late Thirties and in those papers was the theory behind the Kamm tail. I’d showed it to Mitchell when we were working on the Corvette but he said, “Forget that, it’s the ugliest shit I’ve ever seen.” So now, I showed it to Shelby and I told him that the car wouldn’t look like anything anybody would have ever seen before.
‘He said, “I don’t care what it looks like, is it gonna be fast?” I said it would be, but the rest of the Shelby crew told Shelby it wouldn’t work. It was Bill Mitchell all over again. Not understanding aerodynamics, they all thought that to be quick it needed a tapered tail. Fortunately, Ken Miles was also aware of what the Germans had been doing before the war and convinced Shelby that I knew what I was talking about. The crew refused to accept an adjustable spoiler on the back though, saying it was ugly and would not work.’
Shelby had no real money but Tony Weber at Goodyear believed in Brock’s design and agreed to fund it. From Peter’s first sketch until the new coupé first ran was just 90 days. At Riverside Miles was 3.5 seconds a lap faster than a standard Cobra. Shelby decided it would race at Daytona and from then on everybody began referring to it as the Daytona. At practice, Bob Holbert, who had never driven the car, got in and after six laps came in and said it was so fast that he was not even getting near the red line and passing the Ferraris like they are standing still. ‘We then cut the red line back from 6200 to 5500rpm while maintaining the same speed as the Ferraris but we were 25% more fuel efficient than the old roadsters.
‘In the race, the Daytona was leading by seven laps when it caught fire in the pits. Later at Sebring we won our GT Class.
Phil Hill drove it at Spa and after a few laps came in saying it was one of the fastest things he had ever driven but that it was getting dangerously light over the crests. ‘I pointed at the Ferraris, which by then were running rear spoilers. At last the Shelby crew realised that I just might be right and made up an aluminium spoiler overnight. In the morning Hill said, “I cannot believe it, there’s so much downforce on the back end I am now locking the front wheels coming into La Source.” I had them trim an inch off the spoiler, then Hill went out again and set a new lap record.’
For the race, Mike Parkes’ Ferrari was on pole with Phil Hill in the Daytona next to him. When the flag fell, Hill and the Daytona streaked ahead but then pitted, complaining about fuel pressure. In the pits the car ran fine so Hill went back out. Next lap he was in again, same issue. The crew removed fuel pumps and filters to discover that the tanks were full of cotton waste. ‘The car had been sabotaged during the night. They eventually got everything out and Phil went back out and broke the lap record but there was no way he could win. But with the spoiler the car now really handled.’
In late 1964 Brock went to De Tomaso in Italy to design the P70 Can-am car for the 1965 season. While he was there Ford made the deal with Shelby to run the GT40 programme instead of John Wyer. ‘When I got back, the place was crawling with Ford guys and a clause in Shelby’s contract prevented us racing the Cobras. Ford didn’t want to see them going faster than the GT40S; by the end of 1965 I was out of a job.
‘That’s when I started BRE (Brock Racing Enterprises). I built little race cars for the Hino Company of Japan. They did rather well so they gave me the distributorship for the USA and the design contract for the next five years. I thought I was on my way for a major deal. Then Toyota bought Hino, cancelled the car business and used the production lines to build trucks. However, I was then asked to run the Toyota GT program.’
In the meantime, after winning Le Mans in 1966 and 1967, Ford pulled out of racing so Shelby turned to Toyota, getting the contract that had been promised to Brock. ‘I called the chief financial officer at Hino about it and two days later he called back to say that his best friend from school was the chairman of Nissan and would give me cars and money to race through the next season. So now I was racing against Shelby. I developed the hot Datsun 240Zs and blew his doors off.’ Toyota then switched focus to other disciplines.
Back in 1967, Brock had suggested to Kas Kastner, US director of Triumph Motor Sport, that they build a complete concept car based on the TR4 but with independent rear suspension and running on Weber carburettors. ‘It was named the Triumph TR250K and we ran it in the prototype class at Sebring in 1967. It led the race, even beating all the Porsches, but then broke a wheel and had to withdraw. When we presented the TR250K to the US office they were all for it, but BL was in serious financial difficulties and the English office would not take it on.’
In the early Seventies, Brock became interested in hang gliders and founded the Ultralite company, which became global market leader. In 2008, he was asked to design the Superformance Daytona, a modernised production version of the Daytona Coupé. Part of the deal was a car for himself. ‘I needed a trailer but realised that most were junk so I built my own aerodynamic version in aluminium and called it the Aerovault. When people saw it at races, they wanted one too, so I went into production.
‘My grandfather, Elbert J Hall, ran the Hall-scott Motor Car Company and was one of the designers of the Liberty L-12 aero engine,’ says Brock. ‘Motor cars are in my blood.’