Like a truly fine wine, a great car design is infused with history and memory – whether it's a Chateau Margaux grape or a forged suspension arm, the parts speak of bygone worlds and untold beauty. And so it is with the Brock Coupe, a car that is 1960s-style speed incarnate.
To look upon it is to imagine the Mulsanne Straight at Le Mans, days on the Bonneville Salt Flats and a California workshop where racing machines began as sheets of raw aluminum and chalk sketches on a concrete floor.The Coupe's shape was born at Shelby American, a low-slung building in Marina del Ray that became an internal-combustion Bethlehem.
This was the home of Carroll Shelby and the legendary Shelby Cobra sports car. In the 1960s, Shelby American was the coolest place in the car world – sparks flew, lathes spun and metal was bent and welded into immortal machines.
Long before anyone heard of political correctness or global warming, not to mention airbags and stability control systems, Shelby and his team were out test-driving 427-cubic-inch Cobras on the industrial boulevards, drifting through the long curves at over 100 mph (160 km/h).
The Cobra was the alpha dog of the car world. But it had a built-in problem – at high speed, its open-cockpit design created an insurmountable wall of aerodynamic drag. At the Le Mans race track, the Cobra topped out at 157 mph (253 km/h) on the long straightaway, while the closed-top Ferrari GTO did 186 (299 km/h).
Shelby, who had spent time as a military test pilot and race driver, wanted to beat Ferrari and show the world that a former chicken farmer from Texas could beat the fancy-pants Italians at their own game. In 1964, he commissioned designer Pete Brock to turn the Cobra into a hardtop.
Brock was only 28 years old at the time, a wunderkind craftsman and artist who had started out at General Motors, where he sketched the shape that would become the 1963 Corvette Stingray, a car that would go down in history as an all-time classic. The Cobra hardtop assignment was anything but easy: Shelby gave Brock 90 days to produce a running car.
Brock sketched his design on the concrete floor of the Shelby American workshop, working around the chassis of a crashed Cobra convertible. Brock put a driver in the car, and used scrap wood and gaffer tape to rough out the position of the windshield and cockpit. Then he cut wooden formers that acted as patterns for the Coupe's body shape, and bent and hammered sheets of raw aluminum to follow the profiles.
Brock's Coupe design was based on a key feature: a chopped-off tail inspired by the theories of German aerodynamicist Wunibald Kamm. As Brock worked on the car, Shelby second-guessed him, consulting with a veteran aircraft designer from Convair, who told him that Coupe's shape was all wrong, and that its tail had to be extended into a long teardrop to keep the airflow smooth.
Brock stuck to his guns. Shelby let him continue, but warned him that he better be right. Fortunately, he was. The finished car, named the Shelby Daytona Coupe, was a triumph. It beat Ferraris, and collected a long list of racing trophies. Only a handful of Daytona Coupes were made. Today, original cars are valued at up to $4-million (U.S.).
Which brings us to the Brock Coupe. In the late 1990s, a company called Superformance asked Brock if he'd be interested in resurrecting the Daytona. Brock went back to the drawing board, and created a car that looks like the original Coupe, but with key improvements. Brock moved the frame rails outboard and lengthened the cockpit to make more room for the driver, and added some modern comforts, including air conditioning
(as cool as the original Shelby Daytona may have been, its driving compartment was a torture chamber).
The Coupe is an artistic yet muscular presence, a collection of inspired bulges and curves that wrap themselves around four fat tires and a Roush-Ford V-8 engine that may as well have been crafted by Leonardo Da Vinci.
I've known Pete Brock for years. He has one of the most interesting résumés in the industrial world.
After his triumphs at GM and Shelby, he went on to found a racing team (Brock Racing Enterprises) and a hang gliding manufacturing company (Ultralite Products) that revolutionized glider design.
Pete is the kind of guy that can turn everyday objects into timeless art. When he decided to build a trailer to carry his car, the result was the Aerovault, an ingenious aluminum teardrop that's almost as beautiful as the Brock Coupe itself.
Driving a car like the Brock Coupe takes you back to a different time. The transmission is manual. There is no stability control nor anti-lock brakes. The acceleration is mind-bending, and the top speed is in the 200 mph (322 km/h) range. It demands skill, nerve and finely tuned judgement. As we move inexorably toward a time when human beings will no longer drive, the Brock Coupe stands as an analogue masterpiece – raw, real and fast. This is the kind of art that can only begin with a sketch on a concrete floor.