AUTOS: Keeping Carroll Shelby Legacy Alive

Carroll Shelby, the wild-spirited 89-year-old racing icon and king of thundering garage hot rods, lay on his deathbed last May struggling to talk. He urged his younger friend and business partner John Luft to lean closer.

"Keep Shelby American alive," Shelby strained to tell Luft in his final hours.

"I know that sounds a little melodramatic," Luft says today, recalling the moment. "And actually, I think what he said was, 'G*ddamn it, keep Shelby American alive.' If you worked for Carroll, you know what it's like to have the old man's boot on your backside.

The performance legacy of Carroll Shelby, shown with a 1966 Shelby GT350, still guides Shelby American. (Photo: Ford) "So that's exactly what we're doing here now ? we're going to keep Shelby alive," says Luft, who for three years has been the rarely seen president of the independent Las Vegas tuner company, sports car manufacturer and performance parts distributor.

In the next few months, Shelby plans to pull back the curtain on new post-Carroll products. Luft says the company will unveil new-product plans in January at the Detroit auto show, in February at the Chicago auto show and in March at the New York auto show.

Expanding parts sales is a key new focus for the company, the operating unit of Carroll Shelby International. Luft forecasts that parts sales will grow from about one-fifth of revenues today to about half of revenues in two years.

Luft also vows that Shelby will be part of Ford's fast-growing EcoBoost powertrain technology, which puts more power into smaller engines and raises Ford's fuel economy performance. But he declines to discuss details.

"In the past, Carroll was the guy in the limelight and we stayed in the shadows. Now it's on us. We're now the face of Shelby American. But we've got his playbook, and it's a really good one. We're going to make things keep happening here for another 50 years."

John Luft, president of Shelby American, said the company looks forward to another 50 years of growth. (Photo: Autoweek) That may come as a relief to a lot of interested parties, including Ford Motor Co. Thanks to a loosey-goosey relationship between the two companies that stretches back 50 years, the Shelby name has been the sparking flint that transformed the Mustang from a fun little secretary's car into the object of maniacal aspiration among American consumers. Mustangs were good. Shelby Mustangs were better.

And high-end Shelby Mustangs ? such as the 2013 Shelby GT500 Super Snake with 850 hp blasting like cannon fire ? seem to render ordinary car enthusiasts into fire-breathing fanatics.

In this arrangement, Shelby always made a few bucks and Ford Motor Co. appeared on the front covers of performance and car-lover magazines, bolstering the street cred of showroom products at Ford dealerships across the country.

This is the magic of the Shelby brand name. And it's why hearts skipped a beat in May when the salty-talking Texas tinkerer died.

2,300 authorized dealers

"I hope they're going to continue coming out with new cars," says Randy Anderson, owner of Anderson Ford in Clinton, Ill. "It's an important piece of what we do here. But we've gotten no indication from Ford."

Anderson, much like about 2,300 other Ford dealers, uses an authorized Shelby Performance Center to help promote his store. Shelby models are marketed there, as are vehicles from Shelby's primary competitor, Roush Performance, as well as Ford's SVT performance vehicles. Behind all that is the sale of performance parts, such as Shelby suspension tuning components, engine enhancements and gear shifters, and the certified technicians who do the upgrades.

A Shelby car simply sitting on a dealer's property generates showroom traffic, Anderson says.

Along with the Ford F-150 pickup, Shelby cars give dealers some of the Ford brand's highest-margin transactions. A typical Shelby conversion is a $15,000 order.

"They're some of the most desirable cars ever built," Anderson says. "Carroll was an inspiration, and if you're an enthusiast or a collector, you knew who the man was. So I'm just not sure what's going to happen now."

Source: http://automotive.speedtv.com/article/autos-keeping-shelby-american-alive/

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