Pete Brock

This engineer, designer and racer is best known for the Shelby Daytona Coupe but there is so much more to his life and career — from hot rods to hang gliders

- Mark Dixon

MOST OF US are content if we find our niche and become really good at one thing. Pete Brock, however, mastered several disciplines: car design, engineering, race car driving, journalism — and hang gliding. Even more annoyingly, he's a really nice guy.

Brock comes from a generation that has now almost disappeared. A long-time resident of Nevada with his wife Gayle, Brock grew up in car-crazy California during the 1940s and early '50s. 'At the age of 11 or 12 I got the chance to hang out at a 'shop in Sausalito with an amazing French fabricator called Nadeau Bourgeault, who was building a special,' he recalls. 'We could barely communicate but eventually he invited me to hop into this beautiful car and we drove all around Marin County. It was the first time I'd seen anyone steering a car with the throttle as much as with the wheel.'

Even now, some 75 years later, Brock gets emotional talking about this formative experience, as he does when recalling other people that shaped his life and career. 'My neighbour and the young mechanics at the 'shop were racing MGs, so I started going to the races with them. It influenced my whole thinking about what I should be doing. I always wanted to be a racer more than a car designer.'

However, having enrolled at Stanford to study engineering, he quickly became disenchanted. When he heard about the ArtCenter School in Southern California that taught automobile design, he drove down there and unofficially sat in on a few classes, then went to the office to see if he could enrol. 'They said I had to bring in my portfolio – I had no idea what that was! When they explained, I went out to my car in the parking lot and spent a couple of hours sketching designs in a three-ring binder. They relented and said that if I lasted a few weeks, they'd let me stay.'