The Shelby American (Winter 2021)

Shelby gave Ken Miles the task of completing the street car prototype at his shop while Shelby kept the race car project in-house. The latter made its debut at an SCCA divisional race in Tucson, AZ in early April 1964 where it finished 12th OA with Lew Spencer behind the wheel. The car had potential but was prone to swap ends, given its high horsepower and short wheelbase (86˝ v. the Cobra’s 90˝). June 1964 saw Spencer win the B Pro- duction race in the car at Willow Springs, but a few weeks later he walked away from the project after a heavy crash at Laguna Seca. Miles took over the car occasionally and fin- ished 2nd OA, 1st B/P at the Badger 300 at Road America in September 1964. Rootes Motors would go on to sell 7,000 Tigers over the next five years. Cobra production ramped up in the fall of 1963 and Lew Spencer found himself busy beyond his Sunbeam Tiger duties. He was driving Cobras in West Coast SCCA events and ran with the FIA team at Sebring in 1964 (Bon- durant/Spencer 5th OA, 2nd GT 5.0 in CSX2301) and 1965 in a Daytona Coupe (Spencer/Timanus 21st OA, 4th GT 5.0 in CSX2601). That summer Lew Spencer Imports closed up and he opened Hi-Perfor- mance Motors with Carroll Shelby and three other partners. The plan was to sell new and used Shelby American cars to the public. Ford pretty quickly put a stop to that because they weren’t a Ford dealership – a requisite to sell GT350s. The dealership could not be sustained by Cobra and Tiger sales and in September 1965 the store was closed. Meanwhile Lew Spencer became the Competition Sales Manager for Shelby American which, in part, in- volved selling off used race cars. After Ken Miles was killed at Riverside in August 1966 Spencer was named Shelby American’s Competition Direc- tor. In 1967, Spencer managed the Shelby Mustang Trans-Am effort to overall victory that first year, the last title Shelby American would win. On the side, he was also Chairman of the Board of the SCCA that year. Spencer struggled on with the Shelby American Trans-Am effort for a couple of more years, but money and wins were scarce. In 1968 Ford in- sisted that engines – 302 Tunnel- ports – would be assembled by Ford in Dearborn and installed in the cars un- touched. Spencer and the team watched as engine after engine blew up. It was not uncommon to lose four engines in a weekend. With both cars wrecked late in the 1969 season, Spencer moved on in quick succession to Jerry Titus’ Fire- bird/BF Goodrich team and after Titus’ death at Road America, to Roger Penske’s various efforts, including managing Penske’s number two car at Indy in 1971 where David Hobbs crashed out on lap 107. A chance encounter with Ray Ged- des brought Lew back into the Shelby orbit one last time. Geddes hired him to assist him in putting on the Los An- geles International Auto Show. In the dark days of American muscle cars, Shelby was busy with Lee Iacocca over at Chrysler hopping up various Dodge products. He hired Spencer to oversee his empire outside of the work for Chrysler. Spencer managed Shelby’s Original Texas Chili Company in Killeen, Texas and then settled into Shelby’s headquarters in Gardena, California with another ex-Shelby em- ployee, Al Dowd. In the 1990s the Shelby American Automobile Club developed a solid re- lationship with Spencer. In fact, the archived records from Shelby Ameri- can were almost forgotten in the attic at Shelby’s headquarters and it was Lew Spencer who allowed for their transfer to Howard Pardee and Rick Kopec at SAAC. There is no doubt the continued existence of those records has created and preserved millions of dollars of value for the owners of the early Shelby American cars. Lew Spencer passed away on May 20, 2019 from complications associ- ated with Alzheimer’s Disease. He was 91. So, there we have snapshot of some of the Snake Handlers. They were a mixed bag of self-made men and men of means who shared a common need for speed. Some were professional drivers and some made a living out- side of racing, but their lives were in- tertwined for that short period in the ‘60s when the Cobra was king. They answered the call of wind-in-the-face in the cars from Shelby American and helped create the legacy we all enjoy. The SHELBY AMERICAN Lew Spencer Winter 2021 52