Shelby’s Original Venice Crew lay down a charity challenge to Jaguar and Aston Martin

By: Alex Affat, Unique Cars magazine

Date: 06.06.2018

A race exclusively for historic ‘continuation’ cars with proceeds going to charity.

Original Venice Crew CEO Jim Marietta outlined the challenge superbly.

"It is with Shelby’s ‘everyman’ sensibility that we issued a challenge to both Jaguar and Aston Martin. The field of play is a race course, the proceeds go to charity, and while we can’t go back in time, we intend to relive the history."

The Original Venice Crew are the group responsible for building the first series of 1965 Mustang-based Shelby American racecars, and are now responsible for reproducing 36 specially authorised Shelby GT350 "continuation cars" that can be bought – for a lucky few – brand new!

Aston Martin and Jaguar both similarly undertook ‘continuation’ programs, reproducing their own historic racecars in extremely limited numbers.

Aston Martin and Jaguar are both making just 25 examples of their DB4 GT and D-Type continuations.

The challenge? Each marque is to bring their retro reborn racecars to Willow Springs raceway in California. Ten laps with a driver designated by each brand. First to cross the line wins.

Should either of the Brits take the chequered flag, the OVC team will donate $100,000 to the winner’s choice of charity. If the home team wins, in addition to the money donated by Aston Martin and Jaguar, the OVC team will further donate $35,000 to the Carroll Shelby Foundation amongst others.

While these three cars never found themselves on a racetrack together in their days, Carroll Shelby was no stranger to bashing wheels with cars and brands worth far more money than his endeavours.

This same David v Goliath spirit is relived in this challenge.

The OVC GT350s start at around USD$250,000. Yet buyers after a brand new D-Type will be forking out roughly USD$1.4 million, and those after Aston’s grand touring racer will be sent an invoice for around USD$1.9 million!

Neither Jaguar or Aston Martin have responded to the gauntlet at the time of writing, but witnessing these three historic racers bashing wheels would be a sight to see indeed.

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