Michael SatterfieldRacing history has a habit of boiling entire eras down to a handful of famous names. Carroll Shelby, Ken Miles, Dan Gurney, Bob Bondurant, and Peter Brock are inseparable from the story of Shelby American, but Allen Grant belongs firmly in that company. He was not simply around when Shelby took on Ferrari. He helped make it happen.
Grant came out of the California sports car scene of the early 1960s, earning SCCA West Coast Rookie of the Year honors in 1962 while racing an AC Ace-Bristol. In 1963, the 22-year-old approached Carroll Shelby looking for a job as a race driver. Shelby already had plenty of those, so Grant went to work as a welder instead. He soon moved through the race shop and into production control, but he remained determined to get behind the wheel.
His opportunity came through Coventry Motors, a Shelby dealer in Walnut Creek, California. The dealership acquired Cobra CSX2128, a former Shelby American factory competition car, and Grant became its driver. Painted an unmistakable yellow with black stripes in a scheme created with Grant’s longtime friend George Lucas (yes, that George Lucas), the Cobra became known as the “Executor.” Grant promptly won at Santa Barbara and Candlestick Park before taking on Shelby’s own factory drivers at Riverside. There, he finished second behind Bob Bondurant and ahead of Lew Spencer and Dan Gurney. It was difficult to argue with results like that.
Allen Grant Becomes A Shelby Factory Driver
Grant spent part of 1964 racing the brutally fast Bill Thomas Cheetah, but his defining season came the following year when he returned to Shelby American for its assault on the international championship. Shelby had come agonizingly close to defeating Ferrari in 1964. For 1965, the objective was unmistakable: finish the job. At the center of that effort was the Cobra Daytona Coupe.
Designed by Peter Brock around the mechanical package of the Cobra roadster, the Daytona Coupe solved one of Shelby’s biggest problems. The open Cobra had plenty of power, but its aerodynamics became a serious handicap on Europe’s fastest circuits. Brock’s closed body transformed the Cobra into a machine capable of fighting Ferrari’s 250 GTO at places such as Le Mans, Monza, and Reims. Only six original Daytona Coupes were constructed.
For the opening of the 1965 campaign, Allen Grant was paired with Ed Leslie in Daytona Coupe CSX2300. At the Daytona Continental 2000 Km, the pair qualified as the fastest of the Daytona Coupes and started fifth overall. Despite a slipping clutch, they brought the car home sixth overall and third in class. A month later at Sebring, their race nearly ended at the start when Leslie’s stalled Coupe was hit by another car. The Shelby crew repaired it, and Grant and Leslie fought back to finish 13th overall and third in class. Grant also recorded a GT lap record of 3:11.7.
Allen Grant: Then Came Monza
On April 25, Grant shared Daytona Coupe CSX2601 with Bob Bondurant in the Monza 1000 Kilometers. The pair finished eighth overall and won the over-3.0-liter GT category. For the 24-year-old Grant, it was his first European victory, scored at one of the great temples of European motorsport and directly in support of Shelby’s championship campaign.
Grant later went to Le Mans with Jo Schlesser in the same CSX2601. Their Daytona Coupe completed 111 laps before clutch trouble forced it out. It was a DNF on paper, but endurance championships are rarely won through one race or one driver. Daytona, Sebring, Monza, and the other rounds were all pieces of a season-long campaign in which reliability, class finishes, and points mattered as much as outright glory.
Shelby’s Daytona Coupes continued collecting the results necessary to beat Ferrari. On July 4, 1965, the team finally secured the FIA title at the 12 Hours of Reims. Shelby American had won the International Championship for GT Manufacturers, making history as the first American manufacturer to capture the FIA world championship for Grand Touring cars. Grant had played a direct role in getting them there.
Almost as quickly as the Daytona Coupe conquered the world, the focus of international racing shifted. Ford and Shelby turned their attention toward the GT40 program and overall victories at races such as Le Mans. Grant chose another road, returning to college rather than pursuing the increasingly professional international driver market. He remained closely connected to Shelby and the cars that defined those years, eventually preserving an extraordinary collection of memorabilia and the Lola Mk6 GT he purchased while working in England during the 1965 season.
More than six decades later, Allen Grant offers something increasingly rare: a firsthand account of what happened inside Shelby American while a small collection of racers, mechanics, fabricators, and California hot rodders went after one of the most powerful names in European motorsport.
In our nearly 40-minute interview, Allen Grant looks back on that remarkable career, the personalities behind Shelby American, and the 1965 season that put the Cobra Daytona Coupe and the Americans who raced it into the history books.
