Myth Buster
Debunking the most common old wives’ tales
Carroll Shelby
1 THE GT350 NAME REFERENCES THE CAR’S BHP FIGURE…
Racing driver and sports car engineer Carroll Shelby is rightly famous (even notorious) for many things, but one of his greatest achievements was the highperformance Shelby Mustang GT350 in 1965. The reason for the ‘GT’ in the title is obvious, but what about the ‘350’? It doesn’t refer to the horsepower as many believe; Shelby struggled to come up with a name so simply christened it after the distance in feet between Shelby American’s production shop and race shop at its Venice, California, facility. The cars actually had a rather less substantial 306bhp.
2 …AND SO DOES THE LATER GT500
Also not a reference to the horsepower, sadly. The Shelby Mustang GT500 of 1967 had 355bhp, so would have been a more suitable holder of the GT350 title than its older sister. Apparently, the GT500 got its name simply because Shelby realised that nobody had used such a large number for a car before. That said, there was the GT500 Super Snake, with 520bhp. This one-off 170mph Mustang was used for tyre testing.
3 HE INVENTED SUNBEAM’S TIGER
Carroll Shelby is credited with creating the Sunbeam Tiger prototype by shoehorning a Ford V8 under the bonnet of an Alpine. In reality, fellow racer and engineer Ken Miles did it first, as Rootes wanted to see if it was feasible as quickly as possible. Shelby wanted eight weeks and $10k, Miles took a week and $800. However, it was the Shelby version that went into production. Unsurprisingly, with more time and money, it was better done than Miles’ pointproving rush job.