[Editor’s Note: Chris Theodore’s book, “The Last Shelby Cobra: My times with Carroll Shelby,” released last year, recounts not only the former Chrysler, AMC, and Ford engineer’s relationship with his boyhood hero, but also the development process for the 2004 Shelby Cobra Concept. In this excerpt from the book that Chris provided, we get to see how the concept car, codenamed Daisy, came together.]
Every year in Detroit after the North American International Auto Show, J Mays and I would get together to plan concept vehicles for the next year’s round of shows: LA, Detroit, Chicago, and New York. Mays’ design team would provide suggestions, as did my Advanced Product Creation group. With the success of the Ford GT at the centennial, it was no surprise that a modern Shelby Cobra was at the top of both our lists. We also decided to do a new Bronco and Lincoln Mark X. Mays let Richard Hutting, manager of the Valencia Advanced Design Studio, know that we would be reviewing proposal sketches on our next trip out west – as J and I would pay regular visits to the Irvine and Valencia studios for design reviews. Now that the world knew about Petunia, we decided to call this project Daisy. We intended the codename to be a little tongue-in-cheek and sort of a tease. As J said, it would be “anything but a shrinking flower.” Eventually everyone would know that we were up to something, but not know what. I called it a ‘fan dance’ – the most tantalizing secrets are the one that you know are there, but cannot quite see. In late March, we sent Manfred Rumpel to see Hutting, specifically to explore how to help with the packaging of the Ford GT suspension and a V-10 engine. During one of my weekly program reviews with the SVT team, I mentioned to (O. John) Coletti that I had kicked off Project Daisy
