Carroll Shelby Quotes

“Porsche and BMW drivers are arrogant.”

— Carroll Shelby

“I'm not going to take this defeatist attitude and listen to all this crap any more from all these people who have nothing except doomsday to predict.”

— Carroll Shelby

“I've always been asked, 'What is my favorite car?' and I've always said 'The next one.'”

— Carroll Shelby

“I don't think I'm a celebrity. I'm just a guy from east Texas who loves cars and airplanes.”

— Carroll Shelby

“The Cobra is my personal favorite car. The original 289 Cobra is the car I respect the most. I like to drive the 289 better than the 427.”

— Carroll Shelby

“My proudest moments are beating Ferrari for the World Championship in 1965, and working with Ford to win Le Mans in 1966 and 1967.”

— Carroll Shelby

“What I wanted to do was build an automobile.”

— Carroll Shelby

“I never had ambitions to see how rich I could get. I got a lot of contemporaries that that's their ambition, and I don't know very many of them that are happy.”

— Carroll Shelby

“I had a lot of fun driving race cars, but it wasn't my No. 1 priority.”

— Carroll Shelby

“I've had a good run. I've built a lot of things that work and a lot of things that didn't work.”

— Carroll Shelby

“In 1964, when Lee Iacocca said, 'Shelby, I want you to make a sports car out of the Mustang,' the first thing I said was, 'Lee, you can't make a race horse out of a mule. I don't want to do it.' He said, 'I didn't ask you to make it; you work for me.'”

— Carroll Shelby

“I never made a damn dime until I started doing what I wanted.”

— Carroll Shelby

The reason I moved to California the first time was to build the Cobra. I thought it was stupid to have a 1918 taxicab engine in what Europeans like to call a performance car when a little American V-8 could do the job better.

— Carroll Shelby

“Driving race cars was an avenue for me to learn how to build my own car, and that was my ambition all along.”

— Carroll Shelby

I love horsepower.

— Carroll Shelby

“I don't design cars. I'm not a designer. I know what I desire to be built, I know what the end result is, the horsepower, the competition we'll be working against - but I leave it to the people who work with me to put it all together. I don't do anything.”

— Carroll Shelby

I didn't have time for my children much. I wasn't a very good parent; I had a pretty unhappy home life.

— Carroll Shelby

“Every morning I wake up with new ideas.”

— Carroll Shelby

“Racing has reached the point where it is pricing the young driver, no matter his talent, out of the game.”

— Carroll Shelby

“I'm a terrible husband.”

— Carroll Shelby

“I've got cattle on 4,000 acres about 100 miles east of Dallas, but I've also got another 65-acre ranch where I raise American miniature horses.”

— Carroll Shelby

“The first time I walked by a crap table, I felt kind of funny.”

— Carroll Shelby

There is never enough horsepower ... just not enough traction.

— Carroll Shelby

Horsepower sells cars, torque wins races

— Carroll Shelby

“Yesterday's History. Tomorrow's a Mystery. So live for today.”

— Carroll Shelby

If you don't go do what you wanna do, you're just bullshitting yourself.

— Carroll Shelby

“The day you were born, it was already written down the day you're gonna check out. Now, I'm not gonna throw myself under a truck, but I'm not gonna worry about when I die. I'm ready to move on when that day comes.”

— Carroll Shelby

“It was fun to blow off a Porsche with a 3900 donkey [the 1965 Shelby GT350 Mustang].”

— Carroll Shelby

Any man that eats Chili and Cornbread can't be all bad

— Carroll Shelby

“Thank god there's no 48-hour race anywhere in the world, because chances are nobody could beat Porsche in a 48 hour race. They're probably the only cars in the world that would stand up for something like that.”

— Carroll Shelby

“I love raising animals. I look at animals as more perfect human beings. I can relate to an animal.”

— Carroll Shelby