Caroll Shelby was first and foremost a racing driver that later decided to try and create his own Ferrari-beating machine by combining a lightweight British body/chassis combo with an American V8.
However, the idea wasn’t all that new and it was actually very similar to one of the cars he raced in his early years, a one-off called the Schultz Special.
The car seems quite mysterious (we weren’t able to dig up that much on it), and the video an excerpt of which posted below is actually more insightful than most other articles we found online. It’s part of a full episode of AmeriCarna, the show featured on Velocity (it’s episode 8 of season two, in case you were wondering).
The car is a bespoke racer created in the late 1950s by “master machinist” Ray Schultz. Shelby drove it to victory in 1959 and it’s said to have inspired his own dream that ultimately led to the creation of the Cobra.