Shelby ditched his Dallas dump truck business in the late 1940s and took up raising chickens. His first batch of broilers made him a $5,000 profit -- no chicken feed by 1949 standards -- but he declared bankruptcy when his second group of chickens died from Limberneck disease. "I'd been a chicken farmer. All my chickens died," Shelby said. "I was looking for something else to do. And I decided I'd always loved cars. So I tried to see if I could make it as a professional racing driver. And three years later I was driving for the factories in Europe."

Shelby, like Force, knows how it feels to hear people laugh and not know whether it's with you or at you. But both have used that to their advantage as marketing tools. Force is legendary for his rambling but entertaining monologues. His trademark sooty fire suit, though, is no match for Shelby's early racing attire. One day in August 1953, Shelby realized that he didn't have time to change clothes before heading to the track. So he wore his striped bib overalls, splattered with flecks of chicken manure. He credits colorful Texas sports editor Blackie Sherrod with putting his picture in the newspaper because of his unique sense of fashion.

(Then again, Shelby always had gone by instinct and done things his unique way. When he was an Air Force pilot during World War II and flew training missions out of Lackland Air Force Base near San Antonio, he would correspond with fiancée Jeanne Fields by sneaking love letters into his flying boots, then once he was up in the air, dropping his missives onto her family's farm on flyovers. It won the girl -- they were married in December 1943.)

Shelby also won in his first attempt behind the wheel, driving a hot rod with a flathead Ford V8 in January 1952. And that May, he had traveled up to Norman, Okla., for his first road race and driven his MG-TC to victory against other MGs. That same day, against stiffer competition from Jaguar XK 120s, he won again. Soon after, he won an early SCCA event on a road-racing course set up near tiny Cadd Mills, Texas, driving a Cad-Allard. So he was building a winning reputation. But people couldn't look past his clothing.

And so, as Shelby sat in the air-conditioned tower at Gainesville Raceway -- a luxury he earned by his own achievements and not some corporate canonization -- he clearly was not done analyzing. This was his first visit to a drag race outside of Pomona, Calif., and the West Coast in nearly 20 years. He squinted his pale blue eyes slightly, not because his vision was poor. Instead, he was sizing up the considerable crowd, one of the best in recent times at the Gatornationals, and enjoying the energy.

"Look at these kids, sitting out in the sun all day long," he said. "Never move. Hell, they even hate to go to the bathroom." He smiled a satisfied smile, as if to say that in this day of computers, hand-held computer games, cell phones, CD players, and various other technological distractions, he was pleased that motorsports still could command the attention of busy and choice-riddled America. On a gloriously hot spring day, no less, these fans ignored the media's college-basketball over hype and chose to spend a full day at the drag races, on metal bleachers, even though nitro-class drivers were having a hard time hooking up with the track and regrettably not giving them their best show. For Shelby, it was reassurance. He knew the show -- his show, motorsports, still had that appeal.

And he attributed much of that to John Force, whom he considers much more than the driver of the Castrol Ford Mustang Funny Car or the owner of three Mustangs in the class. He said he regards Force as the glue that holds NHRA together.

"Force makes this sport with all his bullshit," Shelby said approvingly. Shelby also visited in the Gainesville Raceway suite with Don "The Snake" Prudhomme, a relentless, cutting-edge driver he sponsored back in the day, and called him "a class act," adding, "I just think the world of him." But he said of Force. "He's really a class guy, too. This sport's really a hell of a lot better off because of him. But it's not bullcrap, really. You think he's just carrying on like an idiot. And it all makes sense. He's a wonderful spokesman for the sport. He's one of the reasons it's growing as fast as it is."

The Sport Compact Series has intrigued Shelby. And because he has made his mark by thinking globally, he doesn't see a threat to the domestic market. "Drag racing is what a lot of them can afford to get into," he said of the young racers today. "You know we're here for big-time today, but these little pocket rockets, they get 100,000 people out there at Palmdale (Calif.) on Friday and Saturday for these kids to run those little front-wheel-drive cars. They're running 175 miles an hour in the quarter-mile. You think of the technology that it takes for these kids to take a gearbox that's built for 100 horsepower and take one of these little Hondas or Toyotas or Focuses or whatever it is and run 1,000 horsepower through that thing. You talk about innovation of the hot-rodders in the '30s -- it's nothing compared with what thousands of these kids are able to do today."