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Several authors over the years have written about the legendary Ford Mustang and its continuing legacy. Much focus from the Mustang's past remains strong even today, with the ideas from Carroll Shelby still making a market impact. Wallace A.Wyss, a writer who hails from Detroit Michigan but who has made his home in California for 36 years, has written a new book entitled SHELBY The Man. The Cars. The Legend. Wyss, also is also shortly publishing Ford GT40 and the new Ford GT, specializes in Ford, having previously written The Super Fords, Shelby's Wildlife: the Cobras and the Mustangs, and DeTomaso: the Man and the Machines. Folllow a Q&A with Wyss below on the background behind his book.
 
 
Q. Where are you from, education and so forth?
WW: Native Detroiter. Graduate in Journalism from Wayne State. Worked in
advertising during the original muscle car era, in fact I was doing Chevy
ads when Jim Wangers was pumping hard promoting the Pontiac GTO. I came West in 1965 to work for Motor Trend.
Q: Tell us about your new book SHELBY: The Man. The Cars. The Legend. Is it a race-by-race history?
WW: No, the Cobras' racing history, both roadsters and coupes, is covered in
brief, and the GT40 program as well but it's all kept general, because there
are plenty of coffee table-like books that go into each car's serial
number-wise and recount what happened to each car at each race. In this
book I am focusing on the big picture--why Ford sponsored Shelby, why Ford
thought winning at LeMans was so crucial, etc.
Q: So by "big picture" you mean no nuts-and-bolts?
WW: Oh, there's nuts and bolts but I figure that with the advent of the
internet, you don't need to go into what the cfm was of the '65 Shelby
GT-350 carburetor because anyone who wants to know a technical fact can go
to a search engine and find that in five seconds. I spent my time trying to
find out why Ford did this or Olds did that in respect to Shelby, which
gives the reader a broader view than just discussing the hardware.
Q: What made you think of this approach?
WW: Well, there's this author I know, Eric Davison, who I worked with in
Detroit on the Oldsmobile ad account more than thirty years ago. Much later
on, he moved to Los Angeles and I worked as a copywriter for the agency he
was with out here. After his retirement, when he told me he was working on
his book "Snake Bit," discussing the Shelby Series 1 project which he had
been involved with. I kept asking him "Why don't you broaden it out to cover
all of Shelby's business history?" but he replied "I worked on the Series 1
and that's what I know" so he stuck to that and came out with a damn fine
book that really nails it. But that episode is only a fraction of Shelby’s
entire business history so I figured "If Eric didn't do the general business
history, I'll go ahead and do it myself."
Q.Did you have any other inspiration?
WW: Well, it's hard to believe but a picture of Ralph Lauren in his 1957
Ferrari Testa Rossa was another inspiration. That's because ol' Ralph,
founder of Polo brand clothes, was pictured toodling along in his $5 million
Ferrari wearing a leather jacket, like an old flying jacket, and a billed
baseball cap and I thought "That's cool--driving a car so fast and powerful
and valuable but dressed like he's going out to walk his dog. I know Cobra
people who look like that--driving powerful Cobras but dressed casually,
unlike Ferrari owners who are always trying to impress you with their
clothes and expensive watches and so forth." So I partly did the book to
try to capture that spirit of the Cobra owners and spend a few paragraphs
trying to describe the feeling that comes from driving around in a Cobra.
Q. What about other books already on the market? WW: There are many new books on Cobra and Shelby but I also noticed that
none of them discuss Shelby's driving career. One is being written by an
old-time racer now but it's still a long ways off and I don't think that
book will segue from Shelby's driving career into his business life like my
book does. The kind of guys who like to write about Shelby racing at Pebble
Beach in the Fifties don't like to write about how Oldsmobile stiffed Shelby
when he was making the Series 1 in 1999. but I like to feel that Shelby's
hard charging style as a race driver was reflected in his hard charging
style as a businessman so it was a natural approach to me to take a couple
of chapters to educate the newcomers to the fact that Shelby was one of
America's most promising sports car drivers in his early career--at a time
when driving was still damn dangerous. And the remarkable fact is that when
Phil Hill was already a professional driver, Shelby was still a chicken
farmer. The fact he came out of nowhere and won LeMans only five years after
he first began making money as a driver is really worth talking about.
Q: Did you talk to many Shelby employees?
WW: Off and on. In fact, you could say this is a story I've been working
continuously for forty years, ever since a pert young lady named Pat Merone
pulled up next to me in a 427 Cobra back in '66 or so and asked directions
to Cobo Hall in Detroit. So, in the intervening 40 years I've talked to
many former employees, starting with Shelby at Cobo Hall back in the Sixties
but, while researching this one, I went back to visit a selected few,
including Phil Remington who still works at Dan Gurneys shop though he's in
his 80s. Also forty years ago when I researched the first book, Al Gore
hadn't yet invented the internet so I couldn't reach people I was trying to
find. Now in a few minutes, I can contact former race car designers and
racers throughout the world to clarify different small points like why the
suspension was unsatisfactory on the Len Terry-designed King Cobra.
Q.How much content is there on the Shelby Mustang?
A. Quite a bit, I have a chapter on the Shelbys. In that chapter I go into
how Shelby was asked by Iacocca to build the Shelby Mustang and it is
interesting to me how reluctant he was at first, and then later on I have
another whole chapter on Trans-Am racing. Then of course, the last chapter
talks about Shelby's re-hiring as a spear carrier by Ford to sell the '07
Shelby Mustang.
Q. Did you learn anything in your research you didn't know before?
A. I always learn! I didn't realize until i read Dave Friedman's book on
Remembering the Shelby Years how much Holman & Moody, the stock car race car builders, were always trying to rip off a piece of Shelby's business, and I
think if Shelby hadn't accepted the assignment to do the Shelby Mustang it
would have been a Holman & Moody Mustang produced instead. Also I think few
Americans are aware that the first Mustangs ever built were sent to Alan
Mann for preparation as rally cars so the Mustangs were already racing when
Americans were being sold the car as a "secretary's special."
Q: And do you go into the later business ventures?
A: Yes, this book goes well beyond Shelby-American. It recounts Shelby's
Tiger involvement, his working with Iacocca on the front wheel drive Dodges
and the Viper, then the Olds-powered Series 1, and ends with the new deal
with Ford.
Q: Aren’t you taking a chance by covering non-Ford related Shelbys, in
that it Shelbys fans seem to orientated toward Ford?
WW: Not really, its pretty clear by the subtitle that this particular book
is about Shelby the entrepreneur , and not confined to just his association
with Ford-powered products. I follow him in his journey from one automaker
to another, for better or for worse.
Q.: How do you come down on the Cobra replicas?
WW: I have a whole chapter on that non-stop knock-down drag-out battle that
has continued for something like 30 years. I tell how initially Shelby was
opposed to all replicas of his cars but then recount how it was that he
gradually came around to entering the replica field himself.
Q: What about artwork?
WW: There is artwork in the form of black and white photos This is primarily
a words book, as opposed to what I call a coffee table tome like Randy
Leffingwell's beautiful (and heavy) book , also entitled Shelby(published by
MBI) which I would characterize as primarily a pictures-with-words book.
In fact my book has 76,000 words and a mere 16 pages of pictures. Most of
them I took myself at various events over the last 40 years.
Q: What format is it?
WW: Softbound, vertical, 208 pages.
Q: Who do you see as your market?
WW: Well, my thought is that, with over 10,000 people scheduled to buy the
new GT500 Shelby Mustang and who knows how many buying the '07 Shelby GT
Mustang and even those buying the GT/CS Mustang, there's going to be a whole
lot of newbies entering the Shelby world in 2007 and not all of them have
been involved in the marque for 40 years like myself, so many will be
clueless about such terms as "FIA cars" or "USRRC cars" or "cut-back
fenders." At the beginning stages of a newcomers interest in the man and his
cars, I figured they want to know basics, like "Why did Shelby become
involved with Dodge? and so forth.
With the newcomer to the marquee in view, we kept the cost down by going
softbound and pricing it at $19.95, so its the ideal bargain book for
Shelby fans to give to their buddies to get them up to speed on Shelby so
they can later dive into the subject deeper and buy the single marquee books
that list all those nitty gritty details of each Shelby model.
Q: Did you have any help from Shelby or Ford?
WW: Of course many authors go straight to the subjects PR firm and say
“What can you give me?” and I did that at first but stopped asking when
it looked like they expected me to submit the work for approval. But I
didn’t want to have a PR man looking over my shoulder and saying Oh,
don’t put that in, because its my feeling is that no real historian would
go for that. If he does, he might as well be a PR man. Ford PR I enjoy an
ongoing relationship with but they never saw more than a handful of pages
and those only on the 07 Shelby models. They did loan me a Ford GT to drive
and that was useful in understanding that car. |
