Fast Days by Joel Jackson tells the true story of one of the most accomplished performance groups in automotive history: the Chrysler-Shelby Performance Center. They took existing cars designed for other purposes and reinvented them into exciting performance sports cars that shattered records around the world. They set land speed records that may never be broken and bested the automobiles that helped create the Carroll Shelby legend. Fast Days celebrates this once in a lifetime period in automotive history and offers an intimate look at the personalities, mechanics, engine builders, crew chiefs, and test drivers who actually designed and built the Chrysler-Shelby platforms. This extraordinary group won races, won championships, set world records, and forever established their place in automotive history. Written in the tradition of the best in the narrative nonfiction genre, Fast Days recounts a time when original design and automotive achievement meant something special
We raced our nameless Grand Prix’s without praise or glory across dry lakebeds, on skid pads, drag strips and high-speed racecourses in every part of the country. We battled with steering, brakes, engines, transmissions, tires, wheels, shocks, springs and chassis. Fighting rain, heat, cold, wind, dust, wrecks and sometimes each other. We raced across the miles and the years striving to achieve more than we did the last time. Some did it for a paycheck, while others conscious of their part in this epic we were racing through, savored the moments, the times to be remembered in the years ahead, these times that I call the FAST DAYS.
