Editor's Note: To say that Peter has led a charmed automotive life is an understatement. His recollections and stories from his childhood and beyond have been memorably documented in the pages of Autoextremist.com. But there are always more. Peter's family connection to GM's heyday, along with his brother Tony's Hall of Fame Corvette racing career (see this week's Fumes) is a story that never gets old, but you may not know that they experienced the emergence of the Shelby Cobra in real time too. And yes, this is just one of the Cobra stories. Enjoy the read. -WG
By Peter M. DeLorenzo
Detroit. As most of our AE readers know by now, I have lived an impossibly charmed automotive life. My dad was appointed Vice President of Public Relations in 1957, which turned out to be right at the beginning of General Motor’s golden era. At that time, being a VP at GM was a very big deal, and the fact that he was the youngest person ever to ascend to that level (at the age of 40) was an even bigger deal (John Z. DeLorean would eclipse that years later at the age of 39).
Back then, GM’s automotive divisions were fiefdoms akin to small countries, and if you were a VP, General Manager, of one of those divisions, you were like a potentate with immense power. GM’s divisional General Managers had control over engineering, production and sales - everything but design, in fact, which remained under the iron-clad purview of Harley Earl and then Bill Mitchell. (Talk about fiefdoms!)
The other difference back in that era was that the upper echelon executives at GM knew each other well, often socializing together on the weekends. And being GM’s PR Chief, my dad - and mom - were always in the thick of it. Two executives in particular who were frequent guests or dinner companions with my parents were Bunkie Knudsen and Ed Cole (and their wives, of course).
Bunkie had just been appointed General Manager of Pontiac, which back then was a staid enterprise featuring uninspired, mundane cars that was barely treading water; it was sort of the forgotten division in the burgeoning GM empire. But Bunkie was out to change that, and in a hurry too. I will save that story for another column, but suffice to say, Bunkie assembled some of the hottest young engineering talent available (including the aforementioned John Z.), and he was off to the races, hell-bent on turning Pontiac into the hottest car company in the industry. Which he promptly did.
One thing that Bunkie did every summer was send over the hottest Pontiac model for my mom to drive, usually a hot red Bonneville convertible with the biggest engine available at the time. It started out with a 389 cu. in. V8-powered Bonneville in ’59 and quickly transitioned to the 421 cu.in. V8-powered Pontiacs through the years. And, of course, my brother Tony - who is eight years my senior - was happy to have those hot rods around the house. He washed them and eventually drove them, and we had a blast with every single one of them. (I seem to remember spending all day one Saturday painting the tire letters on the sidewalls of one of those Pontiacs white; it’s just what you did back then.) To this day, Pontiac is a favored brand of mine, and I was lucky enough to work on the Pontiac account in one of the stops during my advertising career too.
We moved from Flint to a suburb of Detroit at the end of December 1959, and it was instantly clear that being closer to the action had its immediate benefits. It was car heaven all the time because we quickly discovered that legends walked among us. Bill Mitchell, the legendary designer and GM Styling Chief lived one block away from us. (Peter’s column about Mitchell is still one of our most-requested columns -WG.) Unprompted, Bill customized a '63 Corvair Coupe and sent it over to my dad. It was bright red with a narrow white racing stripe – with two thin pinstripes on either side of it – painted down the center of it. It also had the Turbo engine in it before it was offered to the public (complete with Turbo emblem on the back of it). We, of course, took it down to the Detroit Dragway to see what it would do, and I remember the tech “inspectors” being mystified at the turbocharger, complete with factory-looking installation and decals that no one had ever seen before.
But that was only one story. There was the time Ed Cole sent over his personal driver for Tony to drive one weekend, which just so happened to be a white '61 409 Chevy with a 4-speed gearbox (how's that for an executive company car?). Ed was one of the fathers of the small-block Chevy V8 and one of the legendary figures of this business, calling him a “car guy” doesn’t even begin to cover it. I spent the weekend riding shotgun with my brother as we drove up and down Woodward Ave., kicking ass with that machine.
And then there were the Corvettes. My, oh my, there were so many I'm not sure I can recall them all (nah, that’s not true, I recall every single one of ‘em). GM PR had a 1962 Corvette (300HP, 4-speed) that sat unused, well, let me clarify that, it sat unused when it wasn’t in our driveway, as Tony borrowed it every single weekend as he began to “learn” how to drive fast. I don’t know how many miles we put on that Corvette that summer, but it was a lot. There was one Corvette immersion in particular that is still fantastic to think about now, and that was the fall weekend in 1962 when Ed Cole sent over his personal driver at the time, which was a fuel-injected, 4-speed, 1963 Sting Ray Coupe in Sebring Silver. It was right before the car was introduced, and needless to say I will never forget that car and that time. It was like rocketing into the future, and to this day the ‘63 Sting Ray remains the most riveting, iconic machine that GM has ever produced.
You would think that living in a utopian state of constant Corvettes would be enough, but no, it wasn’t nearly enough. Tony got a job at Pontiac headquarters in the summer of ‘63 - when the Pontiac Motor Division was actually in downtown Pontiac – and John Z. DeLorean had just been recently elevated to Pontiac General Manager. One day Tony found himself wandering through the executive garage when he discovered an interesting little black sports car parked forlornly by itself off to the side. Lo and behold it was an early Shelby Cobra, so early in fact that it didn't have the side vents and it had the original Shelby Cobra emblem on the nose (pre-snake). What had been a life of Corvette-Corvette-Corvette was interrupted by reports in the car magazines of a hot little sports car from California by way of England. And suddenly, my brother added Cobra-Cobra-Cobra to his lexicon. And I, of course, would too.
After about the third week of seeing this black Cobra sit there unattended and clearly not driven, Tony got the nerve to get a message to John Z. through his secretary, asking if he could "borrow" the Cobra some weekend. And the answer came back, "sure." Needless to say, one weekend turned into damn near the whole summer.
When Tony first brought that Cobra home, it was like an alien being. People may forget that it was basically a classic British sports car stuffed with a Ford V8. It couldn’t have been more different from a Corvette. It even smelled different, because of its English leather seats. And it was tiny, noticeably smaller in every dimension than the Corvette back then, and the fact that it had gray-painted wire wheels completed a picture that was 180 degrees different from the Corvette.
And then, we went for a ride, and my whole car world instantly changed. Even with its early 260 cu. in. Ford V8 that Cobra was blistering fast. On Woodward Ave. it was the scourge of Corvettes, leaping three to four car lengths ahead of them off the line and disappearing off in the distance. It was exactly then that I learned about having an advantageous power-to-weight ratio, as Tony explained that the Cobra was several hundred pounds lighter than a Corvette. You could feel it, too, it was an entirely different dimension of agile and responsive, even from the passenger seat.
That time is etched in my mind permanently. We drove it everywhere, even down to the Detroit Dragway one night. I even got my foot run over with it, while we were pushing it to the start line. I lived, and it was worth it. After cursory instruction from Tony, that Cobra was also the first car I ever washed on my own, which was a delicate operation since we never put the top up. Sometimes I would wash it twice over a weekend, as we thought if he brought it back clean, he would get to borrow it again. But that was never an issue, because after that Cobra Summer, life would never be the same.
And that’s the High-Electron Truth for this week.