Peter Brock

American designer who, at Shelby American, designed the aerodynamic body of the Daytona Coupe; the Coupes helped Shelby American win the FIA International Manufacturers’ GT Championship in 1965.

Peter Brock was born in New York on 15 November 1936 and grew up near Sausalito in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Art Center and joined General Motors’ styling department in 1956, aged 19. In November 1957 Bill Mitchell selected a Brock sketch that was refined with Chuck Pohlmann, Larry Shinoda and Tony Lapine into the XP-87 Corvette Sting Ray Racer. Brock left GM in 1958.

After leaving GM, Brock returned to California, worked at Max Balchowsky’s Hollywood Motors and prepared a Cooper-Climax for racing. In 1961 Carroll Shelby hired him as Shelby American’s employee No. 1. Brock ran the Carroll Shelby School of High Performance Driving, hired Bob Bondurant as an assistant, and designed the company’s logos, merchandise, advertisements and car liveries, plus Shelby components for the Mustang GT350.

CSX2287, the first Daytona Coupe, was built from October 1963 to January 1964 around Brock’s aerodynamic body. Brock designed the body; Ken Miles handled engineering and testing; John Ohlsen was fabricator and Phil Remington chief engineer. The subsequent five Coupes were partially built in Italy. In CSX2299, Dan Gurney and Bob Bondurant won the 1964 Le Mans GT class; in 1965 Shelby American won the FIA International Manufacturers’ GT Championship.