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If you had to choose one person who epitomizes the term “car guy,” Carroll Hall Shelby would be near the top of everyone’s list. He’s left his stamp on the racing scene as a world-class driver and team manager, and forever changed the face of sports cars as a successful manufacturer both of racing and road cars.

Throughout his life, Shelby has worked as a consultant on some of the auto industry’s most entrepreneurial projects and sponsored a number of charitable foundations. All of this and he managed to squeeze in a heart transplant along the way, which makes him one of the oldest and longest living heart transplant patients ever.

Born Carroll Hall Shelby on January 11, 1923 in Leesburg, Texas, his family moved to Dallas when he was seven. Following high school, Shelby enlisted in the Army Air Corps and served during WWII as a flight instructor and test pilot. After completing military service, his early career ventures as dump truck entrepreneur, oilfield roughneck and Texas chicken farmer didn’t quite pan out (all of the chickens died after initial success).

Carroll then turned his racing hobby into more serious business. Winning four races in borrowed cars, he caught the eye of team manager John Wyer and landed a spot on the mid-1950s Aston Martin racing team. In 1958, teamed with Roy Salvadori, Shelby won the famed LeMans 24 Hours for Aston Martin, giving the marque its only victory in the long-distance classic and setting a new race record of 112.569 mph average for the event.

One year after his LeMans victory, however, Shelby was forced to give up driving for health reasons. His heart was failing and he had taken to driving with nitroglycerine tablets under his tongue. Still, this is a man who consistently turned adversity into advantage. So he turned his attention to building cars instead of racing them and created what is considered perhaps the greatest sports cars and one of the fastest road cars ever constructed, the Shelby Cobra.

The aluminum-bodied 289 and 427 Cobra models and the subsequent Shelby Mustangs he built for Ford made Carroll Shelby a household name in the 1960s. His Shelby American team built the six Cobra Daytona Coupes, which captured the World Manufacturer’s Championship in 1965. The next year a Shelby-led group of Ford GT 40s beat Ferrari at LeMans, putting him back in the winner’s circle at the famous race, this time as a manufacturer with two consecutive victories at the famed 24-Hour classic in 1966 and 1967.

But it isn’t just cars that drive Shelby. In 1967 he inaugurated the World Chili Cookoff competition and began marketing Carroll Shelby Original Texas Chili. In the early 1970s he established a safari expedition company in the Central African Republic and created and produced the first aluminum motorcycle wheel. In 1990, Shelby launched his Can-Am Spec Racer, an affordable racing car for entry-level competitors which was sanctioned as a separate racing category by the Sports Car Club of American (SCCA).

The 1990s also brought Shelby a number of accolades, including his induction into the International and the Michigan Motorsports Halls of Fame, and his selection as the official pace car driver of the Dodge Viper that started the 1991 Indy 500 race. In 1996 he was inducted into the Mustang Club of America’s Hall of Fame. By the middle of the decade, Shelby also was hard at work on another manufacturing project. He reinvigorated his original Cobra concept with his new Shelby CSX4000 series Cobra S/C Roadsters, followed quickly by the design and manufacture of the Shelby Series I exotic sports car and then the introduction of the CSX7000 series continuation Cobra lineup.

Never one to rest, Shelby has embarked on still another engineering mission. In conjunction with Advanced Engine Technologies (AET), he was determined to bring economical power sources to emerging countries and to help lessen energy concerns in the U.S. with the development of the revolutionary OX2 engine, designed to help reduce dependency on fossil fuels to power the world’s economy.

Carroll Shelby’s charisma, his drive, and his entrepreneurial spirit is an integral part of every project he undertakes, from his early racing efforts to his current philanthropic endeavors on behalf of needy children. A successful racer, an innovative engineer, a world-class designer, manufacturer and entrepreneur, Carroll Shelby is one of the automotive industry’s true Renaissance Men and his impact on the automotive landscape continues to be unmatched.