I’ve been reading up in a preliminary fashion on Cobras on and off for the past couple of months, and it seems a good time to core dump my current impressions and understanding.
I do this for a number of reasons. First, as far as the He-Dog Run goes, Cobras are both an essential component and relatively low-hanging fruit: A lot of people own Cobras and love to talk about them online, so I’ve been able to plunge in the pool of bickering and forum-flaming and learn quite a bit in a short time. Second, it’s pretty esoteric stuff: I’ve been a rabid car nut all my life and still didn’t know the majority of what I’m about to post here. Third, it’s an interesting vehicle, and will at some point represent a fairly major decision so I might as well start getting the various options laid out.
Because I am an expert mind reader, I know some of you are right now thinking “I know what a Cobra is; wake me up when he posts something interesting.” (And I also know that to you, sir, “something interesting” is how many Hello Kitty stickers you can fit on a G65 AMG, which for everyone else I promise never to post about.) And I know others are thinking “I don’t much care what a Cobra is.” To both my readers I say this: Hang tight. Anything can be interesting if you have the right teacher. (This sounds like I’m saying that I’m the right teacher, but really the point is the other part — anything can be interesting.)
Plus, if you’re going to read updates on the He-Dog Run, part of which involves a cross-country run in a Cobra, shouldn’t you know a tiny something about Cobras too? Yes you should.
Another semi-disclaimer: This is in no way a fulsome Cobra guide (in either sense of the term). It’s my own digest of what I’ve gleaned so far. Some folks live and breathe Cobras. I don’t have that depth of knowledge. But no one’s stopping you from reading Cobra sites yourself, and this is my site so in a meta sense it’s perhaps even more interesting to see precisely what I’ve taken from the material that’s out there. Right?
In this spirit, I will write the material exactly as I currently understand it. That way we can all look back years later at how little I knew. Chortle, pet pet. (Actually might be fun to redline this post someday.)
The originals.
Carroll Shelby had a racing career and a heart condition, and the latter aborted the former. In the early 1960s, after apparently farming chickens for a bit, he decided to put a huge American motor in a small British sports car because Shelby. His first picks for the prom (Chevrolet and Austin Healey) both told him to buzz off, but his backup dates (Ford and A.C.) said okay. So Shelby took the A.C. Ace, removed the sewing machine engine (actually a BMW-designed prewar Bristol straight six) and dropped in a 260 c.i. (4.2 L) Ford racing motor.
Once arranged, the first install process took less than eight hours and the first Cobra, serial number CSX 2000, was born. Later versions got a 289 c.i. (4.7 L) engine. These Cobras won a whole bunch of races. This was all happening around the same time that Ford was trying to stick it to Ferrari at Le Mans. The Ford GT40 was still a couple years off. The 289 Cobras are today known as “slab sides”, since they lack the massive bulging fender flares of the later 427 c.i. (7.0 L) S/C models. The 427 is easily the most popular body style for replicas today, but was among the least common in its day — Shelby produced a big-engine version of the car but didn’t build enough to meet FIA homologation standards, so he put windshields and stuff on them and sold them to the public as the 427 S/C with 450+ hp in a ~2500 pound car.
Everyone likes to say these cars were cheap back then and gave you a lot of power for the money and so on, but if you ask me the original Cobras were pretty expensive even in their day. For example, CSX 3271 was sold at a Ford dealer in 1966 with a sticker price of $6,145, which equates to $45,000 today — roughly what you’d pay for a Mustang GT500 or other big American muscle now, and certainly out of reach of many speed freaks.
In total, only a few hundred original Cobras were built, and they’re worth a ton of money now — many well into the multi-millions.
Replicars.
If you’re like me, you wake up every morning and wonder how anyone thinks a replica car is a good idea. Replica Ferraris and Lamborghinis, traditionally built on a Fiero or MR2 chassis, periodically assaulted my youthful perusals of high-end classifieds like the idiot grinning interlopers they were and are.
These vehicles are ersatz rubbish and hateful abominations and are a total buzzkill when you’re just a kid dreaming about cars you’ll buy one day when you’re making a real salary and haven’t yet realized that the whole world exists to take your money and you’ll never own anything nice ever because that reality is couched in something called Law School Loans and your child brain is not wired to comprehend that and also we’re out of cookies.
You see what happened there? That’s what replica cars do to me. Replicas serve only to brand their owner forever as a heathen and a moron while making the original car that much more desirable. And replicas both pose and cannot answer this fundamental question: Why buy a fake thing when you can get a used, real something else for just as much?
So why are Cobras different? Well, for ages and ages, they weren’t. I looked on replica Cobras as phony cheapo kit-car knock offs. In fact they seemed particularly stupid because Shelby owners are peculiarly obsessed with authenticity, Shelby this and Shelby that, and even getting the ancient Carroll Shelby himself to sign their gloveboxes in silver paint-marker (seriously, almost every Cobra around seems to have had this done at some point) — as though an old dude’s John Hancock is somehow holy water to your homebuilt bumpers or family-sedan suspension.
But a couple of things do make replica Cobras different. First, the price and build quality and fidelity of some of the better professionally-built replicas is really quite impressive. Probably miles better than the originals, frankly, which remember were at first essentially hack jobs themselves. And unlike Ferrari-look body kits or what have you, these cars don’t murder the source vehicle’s proportions, use cheapo components, or disguise an econobox chassis. From what I’ve seen, top-end replica Cobras are aesthetically true to the originals and actually cost substantially more in current dollars than the originals did in their day.
I’ll talk here about three modern replica makers.
Superformance.
This is a South African company that builds straight-up unabashed replica cobras with an eye to authenticity. These cars are professionally factory built in fiberglass. Superformance sells fully completed rolling chassis, and I think you can get one from them with a motor in it as well. Because they’re custom built you can specify every little thing you want and they’ll build it up. Shelby sued Superformance a while back but also seemed to really approve of the build quality — all this resulted in a license agreement stating that Superformance Cobras are an officially licensed Shelby replica, or something like that. Fit and finish is great, fidelity is high, and the cars have your choice of engines (all huge) and a modern suspension and braking setup. A new Superformance model runs roughly $75,000 and up, which is quite an awful lot of money for a fiberglass car with no real pedigree, no windows, roof, fan, stereo, or much of anything else.
Kirkham.
The Cobra world is full of strange stories and here’s one. The Kirkham brothers own an original (aluminum) 1960s Cobra and were in the middle of restoring it when their brother-in-law bought a Polish-built MiG jet aircraft. (Told you it’s strange.) Since when you’re in the middle of restoring a Cobra everything probably looks like a Cobra’s innards to you, they decided that this MiG jet looked a lot like a Cobra. They then figured hey, what with the Berlin wall having just come down, maybe this out-of-work airplane factory can build aluminum body parts for our Cobra? So they sent them a fax, and turned out, they could. So what we suddenly had was a Cold War MiG factory making pitch-perfect metal bits for the iconic American muscle car. The Kirkham brothers know original Cobras inside and out (after all, they were restoring one) and they today sell some of the most authentic, all-aluminum replica roller chassis around.
Kirkham cars are often seen in brushed or even polished bare-aluminum finish. The brushed finish looks pretty choice and shows that you really went the extra mile for a true aluminum car, but I might personally find it even cooler when painted. A bit more low-key, to the extent a Cobra ever is, which is none at all because the loping idle and barking side-pipes sounds like two loud Harleys getting it on.
For the utmost in authenticity over everything else, Kirkhams can be had with the period-correct iron-block 427 side-oiler motor and original suspension setup, or you can go lighter, faster, and post-1960s tech with an aluminum block engine and more modern suspension. Kirkhams cost more than a Superformance, about $75k for a plain roller and $100-150k for a finished car. You could get a lot of other cars for this kind of money.
Shelby American “Continuation” Cars.
Here’s another strange story. After Carroll Shelby possibly tried to counterfeit his own cars — see this 1993 LA Times Article suggesting he got titles for nonexistent original cars based only on his declarations, and had a company build the “original” chassis — and after Shelby sued various replica makers, his Shelby American company “resumed production” of the Cobra themselves. (Or in other words, got into the business of producing replicas as well.)
Production of 427 S/C cars “resumed” at serial number CSX4000, and once the 4000s were finished they started in at CSX6000. But although they share similar serial numbering to the originals, these vehicles are replicas in every meaningful way — at least to same extent as a Kirkham or a Superformance.
The Shelby cars can be had in fiberglass (like a Superformance) or aluminum (like a Kirkham), and I’m a bit unclear on this but I think Superformance may actually build some portions of the cars and Kirkham may supply the aluminum bodies.
Like any good name brand though, Shelby charges a hefty premium for whatever authenticity its name confers, though here as you’ve probably noticed, the gap between authentic and replica is so strange and so narrow as perhaps not to exist at all. (The gap between old and new, however, still very much exists: Just ask the guy who tried to get his “authentic” continuation Cobra into a photo shoot alongside some originals.)
And much like the way replicas make the originals more desirable, the original builder now making replicas sort of inverts everything by placing Shelby’s imprimatur on modern-built cars. The modern Shelby version is the only one of the three I haven’t checked out in person, but maybe next time I’m in Vegas I’ll take a look. They’re the most expensive of the three and by all accounts they’re really nice.
Others.
A fair number of replica cobras you’ll see at parking-lot car shows or Cruise Nites or whatever are home-mades and kit cars, and I’m not super into those. I haven’t really looked at the kits from Factory Five, Backdraft, ERA, and so on, so I don’t know much about them. (I do know they’re generally cheaper than those listed here and depending on one’s priorities can be a pretty appealing vehicle. Though I doubt any He-Dogs will Run in them.)
The He-Dog Run Cobra: Real or a Stinking Fake?
So, assuming unlimited cash in the Cobra Pit, what’s best for the He-Dog Run: A real Cobra, or a replica Cobra? Well, first of all, it’s not such an easy line to draw. While any creature that can fog a mirror can tell the difference between a “Fauxrarri” and a real one, the waters are muddier here. Consider:
- Cobra replicas are high fidelity. The original Cobras were in a sense nothing special mechanically (remember Shelby’s first build took just eight hours), and the top-end modern cars can be ordered as near-exact duplicates of the originals.
- What does “real” mean when… Carroll Shelby himself may have tried to counterfeit his own cars in the 1990s, Superformance produces Shelby-approved licensed vehicles, and Shelby itself is proudly selling modern-production cars with continuation serial numbers? Answer: Who knows.
- Good replicas are not much of a bargain. Good modern Cobras cost several times more than the originals did when they were new — from $80k to over $150k in some cases. And they’ll presumably never appreciate.
So the question is not so much real versus fake as old versus new. And this is perhaps an easier question, since doing a spirited cross-country run in a car that will by then be 60-70 years old and worth several million dollars seems a bit over the top. (The Gumball Rally used two original aluminum Cobras during filming — CSX3243 and another recently discovered in storage — but remember that in 1976 the cars were just ten years old, a bit easier to come by, and not worth anywhere near what they are today.)
So I think it’s safe to say that even if I do own an original Cobra, I probably won’t use it for the He-Dog Run.
I mean, I’d love to do it in an original, but to what real end? I saw a slew of originals at Pebble Beach in 2012, and they’re beautiful collector cars. (My friend Lauren teaches a student whose family owns one, and has built a special room of the house for it.) Lewis Hamilton, 2008 Formula 1 world champion and current contender, spent his week off this spring rumbling around California’s coastal routes in his original 427 street (CSX3282) with girlfriend Nicole Scherzinger, which is pretty rad I must say but still not a coast-to-coast run. People value these things so highly that it’s almost obnoxious to use one in the HDR when so many equivalents exist.
No, for the He-Dog Run I will aim to get a fakey-poo, which unlike most fakey-poos in the car world will cost more than a Mercedes S-Class and have precisely zero of the comforts. (Not even the clown face.)
My current leanings are toward an aluminum-bodied Kirkham or Shelby continuation car, done up pretty much like the one in the Gumball Rally. (I did drive a Superformance fiberglass car though and it was terrific too. Is aluminum worth a $30-50k premium? Time will tell.) I will say that I’ll probably aim to get under-car exhaust routing (or at least muffle the side pipes) to quiet the thing down a bit. I’ve never been into “loud and proud,” which is just one of the many things that probably distances me from most people interested in this car.
So there you have it — my initial thoughts on Cobras for the He-Dog Run. But tell me — which kind should I use?