The Cobra

July 5, 2015 • 2:40 pm

I’ve previously published a photo and some information on Stephen Barnard’s Shelby Cobra, but yesterday we got to take it out for a spin. That thing sure can accelerate, and it’s loud and has five forward gears. The tailpipe runs along the passenger’s side, so you have to be careful not to burn yourself when getting out:

Stephen in the car:

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A Cobra selfie:

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What I was told: the engine is a 427 cubic inch, Ford 351 Windsor, bored and stroked (shades of the Beach Boys!). I’m also told it’s “naturally aspirated” with a four-barrel carburetor, and has 535 horsepower. It could probably go up to 160 miles per hour, but we didn’t take it up nearly that high.

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95 thoughts on “The Cobra”

  1. Would you please do us all a favor and wear your seat belt. It¹s not as if we are awash in evolutionary geneticists.

    1. Yah, the roll bars are generally useless if you’re not wearing a seatbelt.

      We wouldn’t want anybody winning a Darwin award…

        1. Racing organizations like the Sports Car Club of America require a rollbar only for the driver. In the early days, race cars carried a mechanic in case they broke down. And modern World Rally Cub cars have a navigator on board to give the driver directions. Those cars require full roll cages to protect both driver and passenger.

        1. I don’t mean to quibble but seat belts can and have save lives at low speeds. End of lecture, and I am so damn jealous.

        3. The seat belts are ridiculous and antiquated. They are old school. I never use them. If you crash you’ll kill yourself by hitting the steering wheel.

          1. I use seat belts and they’ve saved my neck on at least two occasions. Both times when I rolled the car, my belt kept me in my seat. The first time (in a Cortina saloon) my door came open and I would have fallen out and quite likely been bounced on as the car rolled down the bank (I think it rolled five times). The second time (in a open MG Midget with a rollbar) the same applies, though it only went over once.

            Both low-speed rolls, as it happens. I haven’t tested my seat belts by hitting something solid head-on but I’d still far rather be wearing a belt than plant my face in the dash.

            cr

          2. An old school lap belt is not going to prevent your face from impacting the dash board. Statistically seat belts are very effective, the kind that have a shoulder belt. Lap belts are much less effective.

            I am so habituated to wearing a seat belt that I have long since stopped even noticing putting it on. I’ll get in the car to turn it around in my driveway and I’ll put my seat belt on.

            I am surprised that the builder who built that Cobra, a very good builder by the way, didn’t put 5 point restraint harnesses in it.

          3. Oh, I quite agree, a lap belt is pretty useless. In the rolls I mentioned, I was wearing a lap-and-diagonal, properly adjusted i.e. moderately tight.

            The trouble with 4 or 5-point harnesses is they’re always so cumbersome to put on. Most ‘weekend racers’ I know have a sort of dual set-up so they can just use lap-and-diagonal on the road.

            cr

          4. All the research in the world says that some seatbelt is better than no seatbelt.
            My state and country was the first in the world to implement compulsory fitment and wearing, of seatbelts, over much opposition, in 1970.
            We went over and over all the arguments.
            The road toll came down dramatically.
            There is no question it would have been better to wear one. Lap only or not.
            With all due respect to your driver I note that he said ‘if you crash you’ll kill yourself by hitting the steering wheel’. Not he passenger.

          5. I humbly disagree with the seatbelt assessment, however, nice car.
            I had a Studebaker hawk that probably had similar belts. (but not a similar engine)
            Nice.

          6. [I never use them. If you crash you’ll kill yourself by hitting the steering wheel.]

            Perhaps that is why seat belts and airbags work together.

        2. Of course they have seatbelts. Nobody races a Cobra – or any sports car – unless the driver is wearing a helmet, a fire-proof suit and is strapped in with a full five-point harness. All racing organizations require it, and for good reason. Anybody who thinks a seatbelt is useless doesn’t belong behind the wheel.

          1. You can see from the photo that, if that car had any seatbelt at all, they were only lap belts.

    2. I’d be open to that. I very much enjoyed Jerry’s visit, a welcome opportunity for intellectual discussions that I don’t get much of in Idaho.

  3. How is it possible for a car to have that clean of an engine? I’ve never owned any vehicle that wasn’t leaking oil out of every possible orifice.

  4. I worked in the Ford foundry in Windsor in the early seventies. I might have cast the engine block of that car.

  8. It’s always a thing of beauty to see a clean and well-maintained machine.

  11. I still contend that soft-top owners will be the first to go in the zombie apocalypse.

  12. I’ve come across two of these in my lifetime. One was a replicate but with an original motor rebuilt by a Cobra racing mechanic, an American living in NZ.
    The guy who owned it was ‘racing’ all over Auckland trying to hide it as it was subject to divorce proceedings.

    The second was parked outside my local lawn mower retail repair shop, nice red one with a white racing strip up over the bonnet and down the boot. Until one day he tried to accelerate to beat a bus and lost control of all that power. The bus won that encounter and I haven’t seen it since.
    Aspirated indeed! As I passed by he did look very sorry for himself.

  13. That is one seriously sweet ride. And a seriously insane engine to go in it. Rousch builds bulletproof stuff…you could race professionally with that engine.

    ATK is done building the engine for my Mustang and it ships tomorrow…it’s “only” a 347 (a bored and stroked 302) and “only” made 465 HP / 454 ft-lbs torque on the test dyno. But that’s still more torque than you can get in a 2016 Ford Shelby GT Mustang, and, though the 2016 has more HP, my 1964 1/2 Mustang weighs a lot less and will have an higher power : weight ratio. And peak HP was at 6,000 RPM where they stopped the test, with no sign yet of dropping off…the engine will run out of usable speed before it runs out of power. I can barely wait!

    Stephen, what kind of tires do you have on it? Unless it’s been “tubbed” (deep wheel wells cut into the rear and matching super-wide rims) and has really sticky tires, you’re going to be traction-limited pretty much all the time (as I will be).

    Cheers,

    b&

  16. Ah, this is so 1970s. Today it’s Teslas.

    535 HP; the two motor Tesla puts out 690 HP.

    1. It’s a pointless comparison. I could prat on about Ferrari 458’s or Bugatti Veyrons but so what? The Cobra’s 535HP is (probably) as much as it can ever use on the road, and it’s not just about 0-60 figures, it’s about how it feels to drive. Is a Tesla more fun to drive than that Cobra? I doubt it.

      (Most fun I’ve ever had was in a 200HP MG Midget on a grass (well, mostly hard dirt) track. When you finish a couple of laps with a huge grin that just won’t go away, that’s what it’s all about.)

      cr

      1. Well, if you like to shift through the gears, you certainly won’t like a Tesla because it doesn’t have a transmission.

    2. I invested in Tesla early on, around $70/share, and made a lot of money. I’d love to have a Tesla, but I don’t need a luxury sedan and they have no infrastructure in Idaho. If they made a pickup I’d buy one in a minute. Tesla is disrupting the car market, and Elon Musk is a visionary genius.

  17. What’s the black thing on the front? Stone-chip protection? (I’ve seen Porsches with a black padded ‘bib’ for that purpose).

    cr

    1. It’s called a “bra” — keeps the paint chips down. People tease me about it.

  18. First of all, that looks like a beautiful car and it must have been tons of fun taking a ride.

    On the other hand, I’m not a car guy, and sometimes it’s darned weird not knowing much about cars, and being a male. I wonder if anyone else here can relate. (And this isn’t for one second to “diss” anyone who loves cars, because I totally get loving cars, even though I’m clueless).

    Among men, it’s almost been like being a non-Christian in a Christian community where everyone presumes you are Christian. When another man brings up cars, he simply assumes I’m conversant with all the models he will rattle off. At a recent street party we had I was with a group of Dads. One guy mentions a car, the talk of different models, new and old, start flying around, and every other man there is utterly fluent with the state-of-cars. It’s like another language. They all assumed I knew what they were talking about…so I just had to nod or shrug my shoulders.

    Not long ago I was in Montreal being driven by a friend to pick up some Montreal bagels.
    He couldn’t park in front, dropped me off, and said he’d just go around the block and pick me up on the way around. So I come out of the bagel store and realize: I have no idea what car I’m looking for. Like literally…none! I don’t know what it looked like from the outside (because I didn’t care) and since I have no catalog of car models running in my head, I have nothing to jog me memory of what to look for.
    He of course had to honk to get my attention.

    Once in the car I related this and my pal said he was exactly the same as me. He would have had the same trouble. And he put this difference really well IMO, saying: For guys into cars, they can actually see the landscape mapped by those cars, all those models they recognize. Most men would just immediately, mostly without thinking of it, register the model of car my pal was driving. For us, a parking lot is a sea of non-descript vehicles. For car guys – most guys it seems – it’s an effortless almost unconscious map of the terrain: “We’re parked between the Volvo xc90 and the Chevy Cruze.”

    Thank Ceiling Cat I have some very car savvy friends who help me out when I have to buy a new car.

    Yet, all that said, I’m thrilled on those rare occasions when I get a ride in a car like the one in Jerry’s post, or a nice Porsche or whatever. I totally get why cars get the love they do.

    **(I keep referencing “men” because I personally have not experienced the same thing among women, not that there aren’t women quite knowledgeable cars as well, of course…)

    1. LOL, Ben’s post that just appeared above is a perfect example of the language hinterland that arises among the car knowledgeable.

      1. Vaal, I know just what you mean. If it’s any consolation to you, there are distinct groups within the class of ‘car nuts’ and even a car nut can be totally lost outside his own area.

        For example, I could identify almost any British (which is what we had in NZ) car of the 60’s to 80’s at a glance. Then we got swamped by Jap imports and I lost interest and cars since then all look the same to me. In a gathering of ‘classic cars’ (which in NZ is mainly British) I can identify the lot, but in a car park full of newish Japanese cars I’m just as lost as you.

        And in other fields, I know quite a lot about the history of European rallying but almost nothing about Formula 1. Or NASCAR. And so on…

        So (to paraphrase Dawkins about atheism), most car nuts are ignorant of all areas other than their own sphere of interest, you just take it one step further. 😉

        cr

        1. Another thought –

          “When another man brings up cars, he simply assumes I’m conversant with all the models he will rattle off. At a recent street party we had I was with a group of Dads. One guy mentions a car, the talk of different models, new and old, start flying around, and every other man there is utterly fluent with the state-of-cars.”

          I’ll let you into a secret – many of them are probably faking it. When somebody in a group says “You know, like the Albatross GT’s intercooled ABS” it’s easier to nod and say “uh-huh” than to admit ignorance and stop the conversation while someone explains what that is.

          cr

      1. Oh, and I meant to add–my daughter’s quite familiar with most fairly recent US car models…

      3. I’m a man who hates shopping and cooking, knows nothing about cars…or SPORTS! *gasp*

        Conversations with other guys is basically impossible.

    3. Yeah, I am similarly cargnorant.

      I also know nothing about *any* sport.

      And since I’m an organist and can practice whenever I have time, ie, evenings after my wife gets home, I am the day time stay-at-home parent.

      Connecting with other guys is pretty difficult. As much as we all like to say every person is unique, it’s amazing to me how similar many guys I meet are in terms of interests and home-life dynamics.

      1. There’s probably a community of you guys available, you just don’t have time to find each other online.

  20. Being a baby boomer, there is something quite primal about hot cars with loud pipes to me! I am sooo envious!

  21. I personally know two people that own those (I live in Southern California).
    Those low-back seats will break you spine when the driver lets the genii out of the bottle. My friend owns a 300HP Cobra and my back hurt for an hour afterword.

    2. Are they real or fiberglass “replicas”? The Cobra is probably the most frequently “forged” car in the world.

      1. This is a 2009 Superformance replica. The frame, body, running gear, and electronics are built in Elizabethtown, South Africa to high standards, then shipped to a destination where any one of a number of engine/transmission combinations can be installed. It’s designed to be as close as possible to the original 1965 racing Cobras, is the only replica endorsed by Caroll Shelby, and is superior to the originals, especially w.r.t. brakes and suspension. You could have bought an original in 1965 for $7000. Now one in rough condition goes for upwards of $1.5M.

        1. Since I don’t imagine they crash-test them, and even if they did they wouldn’t pass, is the ability to get them into the country somehow involved in their being replicas of a pre-crash-requirement vehicle.

          I’m curious only from the academic standpoint – yrs back I investigated getting a Ford Ka into the country but found it was virtually impossible, to considerable irritation.

          1. This particular car, for reasons that elude me, is exempt from California smog regulations. That was an important selling point, but not for me. I’m in Idaho. It has custom headers and side pipes with no pollution controls at all. It gets between 8-9 Miles per gallon, premium, but I don’t drive it much.

          2. Thx – interesting re. CA. I didn’t know it was possible for anything new to be exempt there.

          3. As a guess it has to do with production quantity. The laws *might* only apply to production runs of a certain size or larger. This would allow for one-offs and custom builds avoiding certain regulations.

            It would kill off a small industry if every garage mechanic that built a custom car had to meet every fleet requirement.

  24. I think that there is a particular dream car in the life of most adolescent males, and that dream never quite disappears. When I was 17 it was the Cobra and the entire lineage of AC cars (the Ace etc) that led to its creation. I used to haunt the AC dealership on Sepulveda Blvd in West Los Angeles that represented AC Cars. They got pretty tired of seeing me and told me to clear off for good as I could never afford to buy one. As I walked away I shouted back “Well I AM going to buy a Cobra, and when I do it, I’m not now going to buy it from YOU guys!”. Forty years later when my two partners and I sold our company I went down to Straight Eight Motors in London and bought my Cobra. I am indeed a man of my word…. if perhaps just a bit slow off the mark.

    1. Well done. I got told not to touch or sit on a Laverda Jota when I was younger. I probably looked too poor and scruffy (long hair). Not long after that I got a good job and ended up with Ducati SS’s and Moto Guzzi Le Mans and so on.
      Unfortunately I haven’t made enough for an expensive car though.
      I do have a Subaru WRX 2000 model, which is fun.

      1. Hoon! 😉

        One of the very, very few perks of being bloody ancient is when some traffic cop pulls me over in my old Escort on suspicion of being, shall we say, prone to politically incorrect motoring, sees me close up and suddenly gets all polite. Had he but known, his first suspicions were closer to the mark…

        Ageism works both ways…

        cr

    1. The dealer in LA wouldn’t even let me TOUCH it!

      In London I did finally get my Cobra test drive – a harrowing experience on London streets I must say.

      It is a rather sad state of affairs that age often gains the very thing that youth could use to the greatest effect.

    2. The dealer in LA wouldn’t even let me TOUCH it.

      I did get to test drive the Cobra in London – a harrowing experience on London streets.

      It is a sad state of human affairs that age often gains the very possession that youth would utilise to the greatest effect.

      1. For me – E Type Jaguar was my dream.

        I could have afforded one much later on, but by then I preferred to settle for something more modest that I could afford to drive with enthusiasm. Had I owned an E Type I would have had to be too careful with it to enjoy its performance.

        Oh – and a city is no place to test drive an AC Cobra or an E Type. Could hardly get out of first gear.

        cr

        1. The E Type Jag is IMO the most beautiful car ever. I had the opportunity to drive one once, many years ago.

          1. All Jag sportscar models are beautiful, but in different ways. For me the most beautiful of all is the the D type (the finless ones) and the most beautiful classic roadster is the XK140.
            Going to any British Classic Sportscar show with Jags, ACs, Morgans, MGs, Triumphs etc etc is surely one of life’s great pleasures

  27. Awesome! Is the speedometer in reverse? I’ve never seen that and if so, why? From the looks of it, you seem to be going around 85-90 m.p.h.
    Vrooooom~!

    1. Yes, it’s a reverse speedometer. I think Shelby did it because it was the easiest way, not requiring a reversing gear. When he first starting racing Cobras he got blowback from the sanctioning body FIA (no doubt put up to by Enzo Ferrari, his nemesis) because they didn’t have speedometers, which are required for “touring” cars. You don’t need a speedometer for racing. So he installed a speedometer way over on the right side, by the passenger’s seat, where the driver couldn’t even see it. It was a “Fuck you, Enzo” gesture.

    2. In a lot of racing the vehicle either does not have a speedometer or the team tapes over it to avoid it being a distraction.

      The current World’s Fastest motorcycle doesn’t even have Tach; It has a shift-light and a Wheel-slip light and a gear-position display.

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