The Shelby American (Winter 2021)

Hugus is the forgotten man in the Cobra story. Born in 1923, he volun- teered for the Army just after Pearl Harbor and then volunteered as a paratrooper, He was assigned to the 11th Airborne Division in the Pacific theater. He came out of the war with a lot fewer friends, bum knees, and a nasty scar on his neck from a Japan- ese bayonet. But, like so many on this list, he had a need for an adrenaline rush after the war and auto racing filled that need. Hugus and Shelby were contemporaries in the SCCA and European racing circuits in the ‘50s and knew each other as competitors and compatriot friends, but weren’t overly close. Hugus entered his first race in August 1952 and would go on to appear at LeMans for ten consecu- tive years ending in 1965, the last few years as a driver for Luigi Chinetti’s North American Racing Team (NART). Hugus racked up a handful of top-ten finishes at LeMans, including a class win in 1957 and a sub-rosa one hour stint in the night in 1965 for Jochen Rindt in the overall winning Ferrari 250LM. The Shelby connection came about in 1962 when Shelby didn’t have two nickels to rub together and Ford had little interest in the Cobra other than to sell some engines and transmis- sions to “that guy” in California. Shelby needed money to get his dream off the ground, so almost as a last re- sort he offered his old “buddy” Ed Hugus the East Coast distributorship for the Cobra, on a handshake deal, when and if the program took off. In the meantime, Hugus put up the money for the first two cars and had one shipped to Shelby (CSX2000) out west and the other (CSX2001) to his dealership in Pittsburgh. Hugus set about installing the Ford 260 CID en- gine and transmission and setting the car up for racing. He became the first man to race a Cobra, at the Con- nellsville (Pennsylvania) Airport race on August 26, 1962. The car over- heated and DNF’d. Hugus’ next race in a Cobra was at LeMans in 1963. He almost always se- The SHELBY AMERICAN Winter 2021 42 – Brooks Laudin The Shelby American timeline is often thought of in terms of the cars; as in CSX numbers for the various Cobras. But the fact is cars are just tools, blunt instruments actually, that only come to life when a brave driver climbs aboard and takes the machine out to somewhere near the edge. Let’s look at a few of the drivers who made the Shelby American legend happen. Ed Hugus Ed Hugus