photos: Tiziano Niero
This is the last true Shelby car. Yes, there would be other Shelbys. Mustangs in the 2000s. GT500s. Licensing deals. Badges applied by Ford, stripes laid down in Dearborn. The name on hoods he barely touched. But after this 1989 CSX-VNT rolled out of the California facility, Shelby Automobiles never built another production car working with a manufacturer. Only Cobra replicas. Continuation cars. "In that sense, this is the end of an era," Alex Leventhal says. "There simply will never be any more true Shelby cars."
Number one of 500. And Carroll Shelby kept it for himself.
Alex owns it now. The only owner before him was the man who built it. "This car is not about the car," Alex says. "This car is about the man who built it and the man who owned it for its entire life until I bought it." Would he ever own one if Shelby had not owned it first? "You know, this is number one. Would I ever consider buying number two? No, there's no getting around that."
When Shelby died in 2012, his family dispersed his entire personal collection. Everything went. "I thought in light of the truly remarkable accomplishments that Shelby had achieved as a man, despite the hype and the lore and some of the mythology, it would be neat to have something that he owned," Alex says. "I was attracted to the history."
By 1989, Shelby had spent seven years working with Chrysler. Lee Iacocca brought him in after the company nearly went bankrupt in the late 1970s. The K-car platform saved Chrysler through economy and parts sharing. But Iacocca was a car guy who worked with Shelby at Ford in the 1960s. He wanted Dodge to mean something again. Performance.
The Omni GLH. Goes Like Hell. The Charger. The Daytona. All turbocharged four cylinders. They put Chrysler back on the map. Not muscle cars. Something different. Something for the world that was left.
The CSX-VNT was different. "This car attracted me in particular because it was the first time, really, in everything that Shelby had done, that there was real technical advancement," Alex says. It was the first time carbon composite road wheels were ever used on a production car. Fiberride wheels with gold finish made by a company called Fiber Ride. Irreplaceable now. "It's also the first application of a variable nozzle turbo in a production car. Twenty years before Porsche did it," Alex says.
The VNT turbo used movable vanes to adjust exhaust flow to the turbine. Computer controlled. No wastegate needed. Full torque, 205 pound feet, available at 2100 rpm all the way through redline. Garrett and Chrysler developed it together. The engine was the Turbo IV. Intercooled 2.2 liter inline four making 175 horsepower.
It was based on the Dodge Shadow, built on the P-body platform with a different aero kit, grille, wheels, suspension, and engine. Assembled at the Chrysler Shelby Performance Center in Whittier, California. There were only five hundred built. The only color? Exotic Red with gold wheels and trim. Kaminari Aerodynamics ground effects. Optional Recaro seats. Shelby chose the comfort seats for his own car.
There are unique touches that show the California staff were having fun with the old man. On a normal Shadow, the word Shadow is inset into the dash. On Shelby cars, that badge says Shelby. "On this car it actually has neither the shadow badge nor the Shelby badge. It has a Plymouth Sundance badge," Alex says. This is not a Plymouth Sundance. "I guess somebody wanted to see if Shelby would notice or thought it was funny. It's lost to history, but it's a very unique touch."
When Alex got it, he found vanilla cookies with rainbow sprinkles ground into the carpet. Crumbs and chunks everywhere. Floor, under the seat, under the floor mats. "It's nice to know that Shelby wasn't above eating in his cars. And now I know what kind of cookies he liked," Alex says.
"This is an 8,000-mile car. 7,000 of those miles were driven by Carroll Shelby himself," Alex says. The car handles differently because it's front wheel drive, so it pushes. "You can use a lot of trail braking to get it to rotate. It works pretty well. It's a different technique, but it works," Alex says.
Alex is the curator of the Streetlight Collection. This is his Shelby CSX-VNT number one. The only owner before him was Carroll Shelby himself.
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