Carroll Shelby Quotes
100 Carroll Shelby Quotes
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[In 2005 on racing mechanics] Those guys would work 24 hours a day. Maybe they would sleep three hours and start working again. It wasn’t work for them. They were doing it because they were doing what they wanted to do.
Carroll Shelby
Ferrari never gave Chinetti [owner of North American Racing Team] a good car. And driving it was Masten and Jochen Rindt, a Grand Prix driver who didn’t have much interest in Le Mans cars. In fact, I heard Rindt disliked the car because it was running poorly and wanted to do a ‘clutch job’ on it but somewhere around the fourth hour, Masten was runnin’ in the first and when he came into the pits he finds Rindt in his street clothes. Rindt thought they had a bum car and was fixin’ to go home, so Gregory talks Rindt into putting on his driver’s suit again and going out and Rindt figures ‘well, I’ll just drive the wheels of it’ so they both beat the h*ll out of it, runnin’ it flat out for the next twelve hours. Masten was haunted by the idea it was going to blow up.
Carroll Shelby
[On his first GT-350 when the car did not have 350 hp and did not have 350 cubic inches] How many feet is it from here to the shop? [‘About 350 feet’] That’s the name – GT-350.
Carroll Shelby
Hold the hoods, hold the rear seats…
Carroll Shelby
A race car for the street.
Carroll Shelby
[On a transmission] These goddamn things go out at 50,000 miles.
Carroll Shelby
What do I do to this goddamn thing? Ok, yeah, Ok, Ok, we’ll try that.
Carroll Shelby
[On being asked ‘Well, who did you call?’ on a transmission problem] The sumbitch who makes these things. Who do you think I woulda called?
Carroll Shelby
It is never easy to build a sports car with a major manufacturer. I ought to know as I’ve done it several times. Getting around bureaucracy and the ‘not invented here’ syndrome makes for lots of highs and lows in the process.
Carroll Shelby
My father loved cars…
Carroll Shelby
I’d say let’s go faster dad…
Carroll Shelby
In Texas you could get a drivers license when you were 14…
Carroll Shelby
My family had a ’34 Dodge and I was 14 and I said ‘Dad can I take you to work today?’… [‘Yeah but you be careful.’] He really didn’t want to do it…
Carroll Shelby
I was reckless when I was a kid…
Carroll Shelby
[As a kid in a ’38 Willis] I couldn’t outrun anything, but I was always trying…
Carroll Shelby
I put a lot of miles on that Willis.
Carroll Shelby
My father was always fixing something that I screwed up.
Carroll Shelby
[At age 85] Now that I have macular degeneration I don’t drive quite as fast. I’m afraid that I’ll hit something.
Carroll Shelby
[On how many people that have been called ‘Shelby’ because of him] I’ll betcha there are 25,000 girls out there and some of these girls’ grandmothers…
Carroll Shelby
When I grew up there weren’t a lot of ‘Shelby’s’… Now when I go to these functions there’s so many of them…
Carroll Shelby
It’s a weird feeling to have so many people named after you… I feel honored but I never expected it.
Carroll Shelby
[At age 85] When I get up and do everyday, I still want to be a country kid that I was that loves automobiles…
Carroll Shelby
I constantly think how lucky I am that I’ve never… actually I went into business when I got out of the air force for five years. And I went into several businesses and I was a flunk because I found out when I was forty years old that I have an attention span deficit, I can’t keep my mind on anything for too long before I get bored.
Carroll Shelby
I woke up one morning and I says ‘To h*ll with this, I’m going to go do what I want to.’ I’d been to a couple of sport car races, with a friend of mine… and it just mesmerized me. I just couldn’t get enough of it I started thinking about it all the time…
Carroll Shelby
I started thinking about it all the time. And three years later, out of pure luck I was driving for Aston Martin in Europe…
Carroll Shelby
There was some talent, but also everything that ever happens to you – I think there’s luck, there’s timing, it takes talent and it takes a combination and so many people in the world never get that little bit of luck in there. And so I’m so thankful that I’ve had nearly 60 years now of doing exactly what I wanted to do and I’m not going to do anything else.
Carroll Shelby
And I’m not going to do anything else.
Carroll Shelby
[At age 85] Fifteen years ago I said to myself, here I am in several businesses, but the one business that I’ve been successful at is automobiles. And I’m going to concentrate on that. That’s number one, and the rest – the peripheral stuff that I always fly off and have entries in that’s secondary. Automobiles are the thing that I’m known for and that’s really my love and that’s what I think about more than anything else.
Carroll Shelby
The most important thing in the world that I learned when I was growing up, [is] that you can’t ever give up.
Carroll Shelby
I grew up in the depression, I started caddying on a golf course at Tennyson Park back in Dallas when I was 10 or 11 years old.
Carroll Shelby
In the depression, it was tough, it was very tough. And now that you make a little money you may go out and poof off a bunch of money and you’ll still get into a fist-fight over 15 cents or something else.
Carroll Shelby
What I really learned, was when something doesn’t work out right, you can’t stop. And there’s more ways to get where you’re trying to get, if the first one doesn’t work. You can figure it out, if you have the drive, to do it and don’t let disappointments kill you. And don’t let them take away your desire to accomplish something.
Carroll Shelby
[In January 2008 at the age of 85] My father and mother died in their forties with hypertension, and when I was about thirty I got that. When I was forty I got my first heart-attack. And when I had three by-pass surgeries and then old heart gave out, they took it out and… says ‘I’ve never seen a heart like this, you’ve had at least 40 heart attacks… How the h*ll did you do this? Do you know?’ And I said I thought it was just angina… I just drove through them and sat down for five minutes… He said ‘This was nothing but a piece of bristle.’ And I was lucky enough to get a good heart and that was 17 years ago.
Carroll Shelby
I have been blessed by having been through so many things and a lot of disappointments. But disappointments have never really bothered me that much.
Carroll Shelby
I just keep on driving through it whatever the problem is, you’ve got to drive through. Because it’s not going to go away until you solve it.
Carroll Shelby
Like business, that’s all business is, it’s just solving problems everyday. And 90% of them go away if you don’t worry about them too much.
Carroll Shelby
We won the world championship in the Cobra in 1965. 1967 we decided to build something new…
Carroll Shelby
Shelby was always known as performance… Not only performance counts, but the beauty of the automobile has been something else that has been my interest all my life…
Carroll Shelby
We were going into production and the US government decided that emissions and safety were more important than performance at that time. But we never entered into production of the green hornet. I’m very proud of the fact, 45 years later is still such a popular car.
Carroll Shelby
You know everybody for fifty years tried to get us to be a bigger company. And I always liked to remain small, so I feel like I’m a part of it everyday. That’s fits my lifestyle that we’re still doing the same thing forty-five years later.
Carroll Shelby
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