Carroll Shelby’s Legacy: From Cobra Icons to the 2025 Super Snake

Carroll Shelby was both a man who knew what he wanted, and how to get it. Constantly driven to succeed and seemingly unable to sit still, even during his so-called retirement years, that lifetime of constant toil, experimentation and philanthropy left an indelible mark in the automotive world. And it’s one that is still thriving today, more than a decade after its founder’s passing.

Just last December the covers were pulled off the latest machine to proudly wear the famous Shelby American badge as the 2025 Shelby Super Snake was unveiled at Barret-Jackson in Palm Beach, Florida. With an 825bhp 5-litre V8 at its heart and a 0-60 time of a ludicrous 3.5sec, you can image Shelby himself cracking a smile over the clouds.

Who even uses a 5-litre V8 anymore in this world of electrification and forced induction? Shelby does. And it’s all the better for it

The Shelby name is a worldwide performance icon. See that cobra emblem and you know something special lurks beneath. And it’s a name hard-earned through a relentless pursuit of perfection and frankly, rebellion, against the way things shouldn’t be. That was Shelby in a nutshell. He rarely followed convention, and that same DNA still exists in the companies that fly the Shelby flag – who even uses a 5-litre V8 anymore in this world of electrification and forced induction? Shelby does. And it’s all the better for it.

But did Carroll ever set out to build a business empire that now spans performance tuning, aftermarket automotive parts, car construction, a museum, a charitable foundation, global image licensing and even a culinary spice range? We doubt it. But the fact the man who originally failed at chicken farming in his native Texas did what he did paved the way for what will likely be an ever-lasting legacy.

In the grand scheme of things, Shelby’s driving career was remarkably short. He excelled at the wheel for just eight years of the 89 he would spend on this Earth. The full details of the ‘whos’, ‘wheres’ and ‘what he wons’ are covered elsewhere in this edition, but what came after that is arguably more important in forming the Shelby we know today.

Sidelined from a race seat by the diagnosis of a heart condition in 1960, he never quit competition. It just came in a different form. After a dream about creating his own sports car to be titled ‘Cobra’, Shelby put the wheels in motion to connect the small British AC Cars firm and Ford to bring his dream to life. That prompted the foundation of Shelby American in 1962, a company birthed with the sole aim of producing the Cobra on American soil, and going on to prove the machine’s capabilities on the track by becoming the first, and as it stands only, American constructor to win the World Manufacturers’ GT Championship with the achingly pretty Daytona Coupé in 1965.

Despite this solo success, the Shelby brand has become synonymous in the mainstream with Ford thanks to the Mustang and that fairytale GT40 Le Mans project. This relationship that began back in 1964 when Ford’s then divisional manager Lee Iacocca decided the Blue Oval’s latest offering needed pepping up a bit to truly fit into the sporting mould. He contacted Shelby, who overhauled the original Mustang to create the GT350 of 1965. Up against the likes of the Corvette Stingray, Jaguar XKE, Sunbeam Tiger and anything Ferrari could throw at it, the Mustang swept the board in the Sports Car Club of America Production Class, with the road-going 350s selling as fast as they were winning. Aside from his own Cobra and Daytona Coupé, Shelby’s other iconic production arrived in 1967 in the form of the emblematic GT500. Still stunningly muscular and purposeful today, (anybody who says they don’t hold a soft spot for Nicolas Cage’s love interest ‘Eleanor’ in Gone in 60 Seconds is lying) a GT500 will set you back well into six figures. A one-off upgraded 1967 Fastback ‘Super Snake’ designed by Shelby purely to promote Goodyear’s Thunderbolt tyre range by running for 500 miles at an average speed of 142mph went on to become the most expensive Mustang ever, selling for $2.2m at Mecum’s 2019 Kissimmee sale.

Things changed in 1968 when Ford took over production of Shelby automobiles and the models gradually leaned more toward corporate demands than the ruthlessness Shelby always strived for.

Displeased at this direction, Shelby retired, opting instead to spend up to nine months per year exploring Africa. His sense of adventure and wanderlust never faded, and there’s a wonderful story of a young Shelby taking time out from his military flight instruction during WWII to court his future fiancée by flying his Army-issue planes over her farm and dropping old boots stuffed with love letters for her to find. Charmer.

The travels only stoked other business ideas, and Shelby turned his hand to a plethora of projects – from becoming a major Goodyear tyre distributor to building a specialist wheel manufacturing company (which counted Saab as a client) and even launching a bizarre deodorant line called ‘Carroll Shelby’s Pit Stop… A Real Man’s Deodorant’. Catchy.

Perhaps his most overlooked achievement stemmed from his love of cooking. Being born and bred in Texas, Shelby was raised on a diet of chili, and his love for the warming stew boiled over when he co-founded the first chili cooking championship in 1967. After New York journalist H. Allen Smith caused outrage in the State by claiming in an article that the dish wasn’t of Texan origin, Shelby and a group of friends set about to organise a cook-off between the writer and local legend Wick Fowler – himself a journalist and Vietnam veteran with a sideline in founding the Chili Appreciation Society. The former mining hub turned ghost town of Terlingua was chosen as the venue with the dispute of ‘who knows more about chilli, Texans or New Yorkers’ set to be settled. Except it wasn’t, as the contest ended in a draw. But the PR it generated meant the competition continued annually, and today the Terlingua International Championship Chili Cookoff has grown into a world-famous event featuring live music and the best chili cooks from across the globe.

Off the back of that, Shelby also launched the International Chili Society together with his friend and fellow food judge C.V Wood. During those early events Shelby took great pride in his cookery and often handed out DIY spice kits in brown paper bags to impressed patrons wanting to replicate his recipe at home. Cue another opportunity, and Carroll Shelby’s Texas Chili was born and is still selling cookery kits from coast-to-coast today, each packet branded with a small chequered flag. Mustangs weren’t the only thing Shelby liked on the spicy side.

Shelby was lured out of retirement to reunite with Iacocca again in the 1980s, when Dodge was desperate to revive its ailing sporting image. Shelby collaborated on a range of Chargers and Omnis, culminating in the GLH (standing for Goes Like Hell), many of which were manufactured from new Shelby Performance premises in California. Then came the iconic Dodge Viper… It would be this relationship that would also bring Shelby back into motorsport with the launch of the Shelby Dodge Pro Series in 1991. Initially using spec sports prototype chassis and a 3.3-litre Dodge V6 engine, the series ran for six years in the US before being repackaged as Can-Am South Africa, where the cars continued to compete up until 2014.

There were also some failures, such as the ill-judged Series 1 sports car brewed up in partnership with General Motors in 1999. A bespoke aluminium body with costly carbon bodywork and a rebadged Oldsmobile V8, the car was over-budget, over-weight, under-performing and simply didn’t sell, costing Shelby a small fortune in his investment. He once told Motor Trend of the failure “You’re never so slick you can’t get greezed.”

Shelby had suffered from a leaking heart valve from the age of seven, and eventually underwent a heart transplant in 1990, and later a kidney transplant in 1996. After recovering, he became dismayed at both the cost and the wait times for such procedures so founded the Carroll Shelby Children’s Foundation in 1991, established to help young sufferers of heart disease cover their treatment bills. The Foundation was expanded in 2008 when Shelby also began to fund automotive scholarships at the Northeast Texas Community College near his hometown of Leesburg. The Foundation continues charitable support of both causes to this day, and became the primary focus for Shelby for much of his later life.

The Shelby snake and the Blue Oval would reunite in 2005, with a revival of a hot Mustang range, both produced for the mass market and in an exclusive deal with car rental firm Hertz, which created souped-up versions for hire. This time working side-by-side with Ford, Shelby Automobiles produced the modern 5-litre V8 GT500 Super Snake, and reimagined the car that started it all, the GT350 in 2011. This marked the first time since 1970 that the public could buy both a Shelby 350 and 500 in showrooms.

Today, Shelby American is the flagship enterprise, producing up to 600 customised Mustangs or Cobras per year, as well as pickups like the Shelby Raptor and various F-150-based models. There’s a performance parts arm creating and distributing anything you could possibly need to tweak your own Ford, and even Team Shelby: a members club established by Carroll in 2008 that organises events and shows for car lovers and has become a merchandising Goliath. Shelby’s Texan roots are still there too, with Shelby Garage offering performance tuning in the town of Flower Mound, just outside of Dallas.

Shelby American relocated to its current Las Vegas location in 2013, and has since become a mecca for all things Shelby. Featuring a dedicated museum and car collection, plus cutting-edge manufacturing facilities, the company is set fair for years to come.

The man who built it all may be gone, but the Shelby name endures as a performance icon. Turns out, winning Le Mans in 1959 wasn’t the pinnacle achievement after all.