Inside Scoop: Ex-Exec Theodore's 'Last Shelby Cobra' Book Delivers

Chris Theodore had enjoyed a major-league, big-game automotive career as a senior product development engineer and executive-level program manager. His resume includes stints at AMC, Chrysler, ASC, and a long, solid run and subsequent retirement from Ford. And Chris’s Ford menu includes the Ford GT, Ford Shelby GT500, the Shelby Cobra Concept, the Shelby GT model Mustangs, and the Shelby GR-1 concept, plus countless secret projects you’ve never seen nor heard of.

During his esteemed Blue Oval tenure, Theodore developed deep business and often personal relationships with so many of the program chiefs and executives he worked with; among them guys named (Bill and Edsel II) Ford, (J) Mays, (Dan) Gurney, and most particularly in the parlance of this book, (Carroll) Shelby. And he had a front-row seat with and among them for the birth and lives of the models noted above. That is a big part of what Theodore’s hardcover book, “The Last Shelby Cobra, and My Times with Carroll Shelby,” so compelling, besides all of the great photos and illustrations. Chris knows these stories because he was there, and he either did it or saw it.When things went well, he credits those who made it happen, and when things fell short, he also names names. None of it in a nasty or spiteful way, just telling the story from his well-considered viewpoint. You like inside scoop? You get it here. It’s important that Theodore played a significant role in reconnecting Shelby with Ford, ensuring that Ford Motor Company again began to produce Shelby Mustangs.