The Road to Modena

PETER BROCK, Brock Racing Enterprises, $34.95 from bre2.net, ISBN 978 0 9895372 2 3

At a mere 134 pages including covers, this slender A4 landscape softback might seem an unlikely candidate for one of our bigger reviews, but it more than merits it. It is the work of the legendary Peter Brock, the car designer who was already done with Detroit by his early 20s and headed to California, where he would link up with Carroll Shelby to – probably most famously – bring us the Daytona Cobra Coupe.

It was while Brock was at Shelby American that he was an integral part of a fascinating yet ultimately stillborn collaboration with De Tomaso to ready a car to conquer Can-Am… just in case Shelby’s myriad other projects stalled. The racing car in question – the Shelby-De Tomaso P70, although it never wore a Shelby badge – is the subject of this book.

In helping to explain the background from which this apparently unlikely union emerged, Brock paints a wonderful picture of life at Shelby, the win in the ’63 US Road Racing Championship, great lost talent Dave MacDonald, and the engineering mores of the day, such as the shift from front- to rear-engined layouts.

What prompted the relationship and what Shelby wanted from De Tomaso was power, namely a hi-po 7.0-litre version of the Ford 289 V8 to propel a Brock-designed Lang Cooper. However, even as Brock was hard at work on the project in Modena with Fantuzzi, Shelby couldn’t resist the siren call of the GT40s and canned the P70. He had also, dramatically yet almost inevitably, fallen out with Alejandro De Tomaso. Power, you see.

Luckily, the project has now been painstakingly recorded by its frustrated mastermind, whose experiences as an incredulous cutting-edge Yank working in a Heath-Robinson-style Italian carrozzeria in the 1960s are hilarious.