The American Speed Festival is honoring Brock for designing the Shelby Daytona Cobra, helping shape the C2 Corvette, and for his long love affair with racing.
had left GM—and Larry Shinoda gets most of the credit. But the major inspiration for Shinoda was Brock’s sketch, which Mitchell liked and urged the team to further develop.Remember how Brock doesn’t like to rest? He and fellow designer Ian Callum have been working in recent years with an Irish company,After leaving GM in 1958, Brock returned to California and rekindled his love for motorsports.
In 1961, Brock was hired by Carroll Shelby as employee No.1 of the newborn Shelby American brand. Brock ran the Carroll Shelby School of High Performance Driving and worked at Shelby American until 1965 designing logos, merchandise, ads, and car liveries, as well as the Shelby components of the Shelby Mustang GT350s.
“I said, ‘There is a loophole in the rules that will allow us to take the body off the roadster and put a new body on it.’ And I said, ‘I can design a car with so little drag that we can take the same exact chassis underneath, and we can go from 160 miles an hour to almost 200.’ I said, ‘I can guarantee it will do at least 180.’”
Carroll Shelby gave the greenlight, and the Shelby Daytona Cobra coupe was born. “We went over to Europe, and we just absolutely obliterated everybody with it,” Brock says of the car he designed that won the FIA GT World Championship in 1965.“Winning the world championship with that, especially when we went out and beat Ferrari, who had been dominant for so many years—and to do it with an American production engine—it was really, really satisfying,” Brock recalls.