Ak Miller's Bonneville AC Bristol-Ford V8

[Historybuff]

I met Ak Miller maybe decades ago and remember him saying "I beat Shelby to the idea of putting a V8 in an Ace."
I found a picture on the net of his Ace Bristol (recognizable by Mustache type body sculpturing outside of grille cavity) but the odd thing it said 289 on the doors and 260 on the hood. But the guy who took the picture said it was taken around '62 or '63 which doesn't put him before Shelby chronologically. When I met him in '65 or '66 he was a Ford Performance consultant, traveling with Shelby, so I think he could have gotten some free engines to experiment with about the time of the Shelby Cobra project. Also Ak raced a Devin bodied car , maybe even Pikes Peak hill climbed it, that might have been all that was left of his Ace-Bristol, with a lot of American hot rod parts added. He did five Devin bodied specials but only one was an Ace. So my question boils down to: was Ak spoofin' me that he had shown Shelby the way to the Holy Grail?