We’d had plenty of requests to make the full transcript of the Caroll Shelby's interview available (hence its inclusion in the DVD), but on digging out the files to post them on-line I was shocked to discover it’s been nearly ten years since Shelby and I sat in his LA home to recall his adventures. Doubly shocked when I think that the seeds of the film were sown at the Palm Springs Desert Races - some 10 years earlier again.

Reviewing them now, I can see they’re a goldmine of information. Transcripts are normally fairly hastily typed, don’t always include the interviewer’s questions and certainly never really capture what’s on screen – especially with someone like Shelby.

Rather than refine or amend them in any way, they’re here in their pure/raw form - so I hope you’ll forgive the typos, spelling etc. There are some incongruous gaps, normally a result of Carroll noticing one of the film crew’s glass was almost empty. He’d break off mid-flow to shout out, “Herlita !! We need some more juice in here!”, then turn to the crew, “Y’all OK ? Anybody else want something? Something to eat? Hell, it must be past lunchtime – y’all musta been bored to death hours ago list’nin’ to my bull”. We weren’t.

The interviews ran for six hours in all (two sessions) and I remember crying after seeing a 4 hour rough cut – we’d lost so much and still had to get it down to an hour. The second disk on the DVD goes some way towards re-dressing the balance (with around an extra 90 minutes that never made it into the finished film). Re-reading the transcript took me right back to the moment we said goodbye to Shelby, having been transfixed for 6 hours, and not knowing what to do with it all.

Anyway, here’s what we’ve done with it: