Matt,

I really enjoyed your article and it had me laughing. Gotta love a great road trip. I find what helps me on those sorts of drives is just before leaving I watch old reruns of the movie Deliverance. It helps prevent me from trying to make friends with the locals I meet along the way.

I’m envious of your adventure and have known Carroll for years. Great guy, great stories and you’ll have a great time reminiscing this adventure for years to come each and every time you say, “Did I ever tell ya bout the time we drove do to the town that Carroll Shelby owns and……….”

Here is a little something Carroll wrote not long ago….

Back in 1967, when I had 120,000 acres in West Texas on the Rio Grande River next to Mexico, we decided to have the first World’s Championship Chili Cookoff there—and the battle is still raging. It started in a little old ghost town called Terlingua. That was just after we’d won the ’67 Trans-Am Championship for Ford.

Terlingua seemed to me the perfect place to have our first cookoff, so I formed the International Chili Society that started the world’s championship and it’s still working. Terlingua’s spirit of daring and hell-raising came out of its mining days, and that inspired a lot of rebellious ideas we had for racing and how we went about it. Our Trans-Am title winning competition version of the notchback Shelby GT350 Trans-Am Mustang that year wore the Terlingua Racing Team name with black and yellow crest that team co-founder Bill Neale designed. It was a mean-looking rabbit with one paw raised, ready to fight. People were calling it ‘the prancing rabbit’ because of its yellow background like Ferrari’s emblem.

Since I owned the town, we even set up our own local government for Terlingua and ran it from restaurants and bars we knew up in Dallas. Our official Terlingua bird was a buzzard, but they never landed in Terlingua’s trees, because Terlingua didn’t have any trees. Ken Miles was the first to win a race in a Terlingua Racing Team Mustang, before Jerry Titus drove them, and Steve McQueen was a team member, too.

That chili cookoff in Terlingu, trying to sell the idea of it, we had a big bunch from the press come down and there was no motel or hotel for them, just those old buildings and some tents. They could only bring a toothbrush and sleeping bag, and I had to send my DC-3 back to El Paso four times in three days to fly in more booze. That was a party in a time I’ll never forget.

MUSTANG SLUT STAIN BUTT PAIN BEER BRAIN!