The Shelby Series I Was Carroll Shelby’s Most Glorious Failure

The Shelby Series 1 wasn’t the success people expected, but not for a lack of trying. The advice “Work smarter, not harder,” though applicable in most situations, doesn’t leave room for a lot of variables and Carroll Shelby’s 1990s–and then 2000s, but we’ll get to that–moonshot sportscar encountered a lot of them. 

By 1990, Carroll Shelby had done a lot. He’d won Le Mans as a driver, then as a constructor. His Cobras had beaten Corvettes, Dodge hired him to make the Omni exciting, and his name was on a can of chili. But those automotive successes came from improving someone else’s car; he’d never truly built his own production car from the ground up.

[Ed note: I assume by this point you’re already extremely familiar with Zack Klapman, the co-host of The Smoking Tire, contributor to all sorts of places, and also one of my favorite people in the world. I think he’s one of the smartest, funniest, and most insightful people in the car world so it’s a delight to have him on the site – MH]

The Cobra was a British car with the engine swapped like a Beatles-era SEMA project; the Ford GT prototype had already been built when he was hired to run the program; and the Omni was already omnipresent before he gave it more, uh, power. In the early ‘90s he decided to take his shot.

As detailed in the YouTube video above (click to see it here), the idea was one Carroll knew well: build a lightweight sports car in America that was as fast as the expensive exotics that arrive on our shores from exotic places like Miland and Hethel. Basically, he wanted to build a modern Cobra using technology from Indycar and F1, including a body made from carbon fiber.

Today, a carbon body hiding a V8 is commonplace. During the last few years of the current “everything bubble,” it seemed like a new supercar or hypercar company “unveiled” a rendering every few weeks. Some even got built. That’s because carbon fiber is as prevalent in cars as added protein is in snack foods. For $50 you can get an enhanced Gatorade and enough eBay CF trim to make your Altima’s interior look like it was a special order from Stuttgart.

That wasn’t the case in 1990, the year of the Series 1’s conception. If you wanted a fast car bearing the lord’s weave you had to walk into a Ferrari, Mercedes, or Jaguar dealership and hand over three-quarters of a million dollars. 

Shelby’s original plan for the Series 1 featured a lot of good ideas. The front suspension would be inboard, F1-style, reducing unsprung mass and moving the center of gravity inward. The engine would also come from racing, a V8 being used by IndyCar. The goal was a car that went like hell, weighed less than a Corvette, and cost under $100,000. 

But that’s not what happened. The Series 1 hit production delays that rival the F-35. 

Don Landy, the man in charge of Shelby American at the time, knew that in order to build a real car–not a kit car–they would have to partner with an OEM. Designing, building, and certifying a new car was more than the little company could do on its own. After a few meetings, Oldsmobile (known for making sports cars) agreed to give Shelby $1M for prototypes. Oldsmobile had an engine in the Indy Racing League, so a sports car was a natural promotional tool. However, after Shelby had started building the prototypes, Oldsmobile restructured its management and pulled the funding. Stuck with half-finished cars and no money, Mr Shelby got creative. He did an interview with Autoweek in which he mentioned the concept cars, creating public buzz. 

Then his team rang up a bunch of dealerships and offered them early access to production cars in exchange for a generous deposit. According to this great history from Silodrome, a total of 16 dealers agreed to the $50k sum, giving the Shelby team the $800,000 they needed to finish the prototyping process. They took the prototypes on a press tour until the public interest became undeniable, and Oldsmobile greenlit the car. 

Funding it was hard, but building them was about to become a nightmare. 

The project had grown beyond the core team’s ability, so manufacturing was being done by Venture Industries, who dealt with problems literally from top to bottom. Those carbon fiber bodies? Unintentionally porous. If you’ve ever tried to paint a colander (who hasn’t) you can guess how well that went. According to MotorTrend, Venture’s solution was to cover the holes in body filler, adding hundreds of pounds to the car and all but removing its weight advantage over the Corvette.

Silodrome’s history mentions that Shelby planned to use the Borg Warner transaxle from the Corvette, but GM wouldn’t let them. Carroll’s team found a Texas-based ZF supplier who would convert a 5-speed unit into a 6-speed, but a number of them had issues ranging from bad linkage to leaks, requiring repair or replacement. The delays piled on. 

Ah, but the engine! Surely Oldsmobile couldn’t back out of the engine deal. After all, it was their idea! That’s true and, thankfully, they didn’t. Oldsmobile gave Shelby the 4.2-liter Aurora V8 (basically a shrunken Cadillac Northstar) as promised. What they wouldn’t provide was the computer code needed to tune the engine, so instead of it making 350HP it made 320. This might seem unfair but Oldsmobile had to protect the flourishing sportscar lineup that we still love today… Shelby clapped back by offering a supercharger option for a whopping additional $20k. 

We’re not done. Early prototypes were cracking the rear subframes; the chassis was so strong that it would bend the jig it was meant to cool in, which delayed production until a new jig was found; the soft tops had to be redesigned after customers received their cars; the cars were delivered several years later than promised; and the price had ballooned from $80,000 (twice as much as a C5 Corvette at the time) to nearly $175,000 without the supercharger. This was Ferrari 360 money for LeSabre parts. Oh, and GM shuttered Oldsmobile in 2004, essentially closing the very dealerships at which Series 1 were to be sold. After all this effort, the Series 1 would be sold directly to consumers as a kit car.

It’s a shame, because the car in this video drove quite well. I’ve read reviews that involved varying amounts of reliability, but my experience with Beau’s car was flawless. The inboard suspension is supple without feeling lazy, reminiscent of Lotus. The supercharged engine absolutely makes the advertised 400HP.  I think the design is too curvaceous to be timeless but is absolutely representative of the style of the times.

The front-mid-engine layout feels balanced, although the firewall intrudes into the cabin so much your feet are practically in the door. Still, I could feel that the idea was sound. Carroll Shelby (and his team) know how to build a fast car that drives well and if they had had all the money and support they needed I have no doubt that this would have been one of the most exciting cars of the 20th century. Miata weight, Corvette power, what’s not to love? 

As you’ve now seen, the process of constructing a production car is far from simple, even if you have a famous name attached to a not-too-big-to-fail OEM. While it is sad that Carroll never got to see his dream realized, it makes his successes–and the existence of any good sports car out there–even more impressive.