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When famed race photographer Bill Warner came across
an old, beat up wreck of a sports racer in a South Carolina
junkyard a few years back he could hardly believe what he
was seeing. Over the years he'd shot pictures of every significant
racing car in the world and was pretty sure that
what he was looking at were the remains of a long lost
pre-Can-Am era racer that had been built in Carroll Shelby's
race shop for one of his star drivers, Dave McDonald.
Warner scratched away some of the flaking white paint,
finding traces of a brilliant orange hue that had been the
signature color for the Lang–Cooper. As a vintage racer
and collector of rare automobiles Warner couldn't resist
the temptation to buy the wreck and restore it…maybe
even to race it someday! After getting it home Warner
did some research, going through his archives to see if he
could find some period shots of the car that might help
establish what it had looked like when it originally raced
and, more importantly, what the chassis had looked like
and what it had used for power.
Researching the car's history, Warner called everyone he
could locate who might have had some knowledge of the
Lang's mysterious and tragic past. Through his racing contacts
he finally located the man behind the project and
learned of the car's early history.
Craig Lang, an enthusiastic young racer from Hawaii,
had followed his friend Al Dowd to California when Dowd
retired from the Coast Guard motor pool to take over management
of Shelby's race shop in Venice, California. There
he became fast friends with race mechanics Dave
McDonald, Wally Peat and a Corvette racer named Joe
Freitas. McDonald was just starting his meteoric rise in the
west coast's professional sports car racing scene, so Lang
had a good opportunity to learn the racing game from the
inside. The race shop in Venice was filled with championship
race cars for every series running at the time.
Dave McDonald was an anomaly among racers. His
incandescent dirt track style on pavement, and driving ambition
to be the best, were shrouded off-track by a quiet
reserve that fit well with his fellow wrenches in the Texan's
organization. As the team's insider, McDonald was their
hero and they spent long extra hours helping prepare the
Cobras that he drove to help Shelby win the USRRC title in
'63. Shelby's plans for the following season were more
ambitious. He planned to use the powerful 289 Cobra
engines that his tuners had developed in a slightly different
manner. His successful English chassis/American engine
formula was upgraded to utilize a handful of John Cooper's
Monaco chassis, which up until that time had been fitted
with 2.5 liter Coventry Climax engines. The resulting V-8
powered "King Cobras" laid waste to the competition in the
early pro-races and were ideally suited to McDonald's flamboyant
style.
After winning several races in these cars Lang, Freitas
and Peat decided they could further their friend's career
with something even faster. Lang offered to back the project
provided the car would still be transported and serviced
within the Shelby team. So a new, bare Cooper chassis was
acquired and race car fabricator Don Edmunds was hired to
build the body. |
