Carroll Shelby gets lit on fire, put out, and when everyone is gawking wondering if he's okay, he's perplexed and agitated, "FINISH IT! FILL THE TANK!"
Shelby needs everyone onside here, and so he asks the pertinent question (the ONLY pertinent question, he'd have us believe), "AM I ON GODDAM FIRE?" And, as he asks it, the answer is actually no. Once they twig to that, and what that means, he's got them all back on board and working as a team again. Carroll Shelby is driven and maniacal, but he's also a consensus builder (of SORTS; he's sort of more of a bully sometimes, and I think Howard Roark is the natural comparison point, literarily speaking) and a leader, or what he thinks is a leader. He sees the value in bringing people along, however forcefully, to his point of view. Versus Ken Miles who doesn't GIVE A FUCK what you or anyone thinks about anything.
Sheepish, halting, awkward; these people are the opposite of Shelby, who is determined, decisive and a man of action, both in rhetoric and in deed. But he doesn't hate them for being different from him. He knows how to speak to them, even if it's a little harsh for my taste. It was the era, and he is a Great Man, of sorts. We'll meet a few more, too, like Henry Ford II, another Great Man who compares unfavorably to the Great Man we've elected to follow in this narrative.
I read this as "... are you fucking kidding me right now?"
#ShowDon'tTell
#GoodDialogue typically isn't advancing #plot, it's revealing #character & motivations. I think of #exposition as a sometimes-necessary evil, but the joy of #goodwriting & #dialogue is when it's showing, not telling, us
Here, #CarrollShelby so clearly determined, willful
#alttext