The history of the AC Cobra is a convoluted one, full of behind the scenes sculduggery, world class International intrigue, 170 mile per hour blasts through the night, fog and rain and the life and times of one failed chicken farmer out of East Texas named Carroll Hall Shelby.

It turns out that the AC company was not the first Company ex-race driver Shelby went to when he was trying to make an American sports car. In the late ‘50s, he had asked Ed Cole of GM to provide some Corvette chassis and three were sent. Using money from investor Ed Laughlin and oilman Jim Hall, Shelby sent them to Italy to be bodied by Scaglietti, Ferrari’s race car body builder. But even though they looked like Ferraris, they didn’t perform any better than stock Corvettes and there was no interest. Plus, before Shelby could develop them further, Ed Cole was advised by GM’s high brass to tell Shelby to “forget he ever saw those cars.” They threatened the Corvette.

Shelby then went to Sir Donald Healey, but Healey was not interested in plopping a Chevy small block into a Healey as the cars were selling quite well with their British four or six cylinder engines.

Then, while Shelby was having lunch an editor, he heard AC Cars
Ltd. had lost their inline six supplied by Bristol Aeroplane Co. He coupled that with news that Ford was making a small block V8 that would weigh about 400 lbs. and quickly wrote letters to AC and Ford with the effect of making each think the other company was behind him in the effort towards making an Anglo-American sports car.

At the time the production AC was fitted with the English Ford Zephyr inline six, and because it was a lower engine with the Zephyr installed, the hood was lengthened and lowered, with the result that those 17 so equipped with the inline six Ford look like the first Cobras.

Shelby sent AC a 221 cu in. six, because that was the size Ford was going to offer the engine in at first. Then he went to England and tested the car out on Silverstone race track. Leaving AC a list of things to beef up (many parts broke) he went back to California while AC fettled the car with all the corrections by which time a 260 cu in small block had arrived in Los Angeles from Ford.

Shelby borrowed space from Dean Moon (of Moon Eyes speed accessory fame) and the 260 was squeezed the 260—basically the same as offered in the Falcon Sprint—into the car.) It was connected to a Moss gearbox and Shelby and Moon took it out to street race it but couldn’t find a Corvette to humble.

That first car which in one story is identified as Chassis no. 1001, and later as CSX 2000 was the only one built with inboard discs at the rear, an idea Shelby quickly abandoned because
1.) it would heat up the differential fluid and 2.)inboard discs were harder to reach for the pit crew at a race.

The car was also smooth hooded, but Shelby later on added a small scoop like that on the ’57 T-bird to get the engine cooler air. The first one also didn’t have a beer keg shaped overflow reservoir for the engine, which was added by the time Cobras went into production.

By this point in time, Shelby had invested about $25,000 of his own money into building that first car –even with free engines and a free chassis and body, and he didn’t have enough to built the second and third car. Fortunately, a fellow racer, Ed Hugus, who owned a foreign car dealership in Philadelphia, put in orders for a second and third car. According to Shelby’s official website (http://www.carrollshelby.com/history.html) CSX 2001 (the second Cobra built) was shipped by air from England (minus engine, transmission, and rear end) to New York and is prepared by Ed Hugus in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. CSX 2002 is air freighted to Los Angeles and built into the first competition Cobra.

Somewhere along the way Shelby got a car to Ford in Dearborn
and they assigned an engineer to work out the bugs. The car wouldn’t handle and many experiments were tried, including two shocks at each corner, before the engineer go the car drivable.

Meanwhile Shelby started building racing versions figuring, like Ferrari, race cars would get the word out there and then fans would buy street versions.

The 260 engine was used up to the 75th car built and then the switch was made to 289 engines. They didn’t weigh any more and delivered more hp and torque. There were also changes to the gearbox, to a Borg Warner T-10 and changes to the radiator going from a British-built unit that couldn’t do the job to an all-aluminum one from the Corvette parts shelves to a Ford-built one designed for the car.

The 260 cars came with 260s but as soon as the 289 was announced, some owners came back for a retrofit of a 289;(thereby hurting their cars future value generations hence). As often as not they would have the louvers punched into the body side that were on the 289 cars.

Meanwhile for racing purposes there were special models developed
to coincide to the rules of each organization. For the FIA (Federation Internationale d’automobile) the cars had to have certain equipment and a set size of wheel and tire. A LeMans model also included a short trunk lid so the car could be run at LeMans with a hardtop that gave it another 10 mph top end with smoother aerodynamics. But later when they developd the USRRC car (for United States Road Racing club), Shelby wanted wider wheels so he added patches to the bodywork to cover the tires.

Toward the end of 1962, Alan Turner , the chief engineer at AC, completed a major design change of the car's front end and was able to fit it with rack and pinion steering while still using transverse leaf spring suspension. The new car went into production in early 1963 and it became known as the Mark II. The steering rack was borrowed from the MGB while the new steering column came from the VW Beetle. About 528 Mark II Cobras were produced to the summer of 1965 (the last US bound Mark II, CSX2589, was produced in November of 1964).

The Cobras cleaned up on domestic racetracks, driving Corvettes into temporary oblivion, but on the International racetracks, the Ferrari GTO, even with only a 3-liter V12 engine against the Cobra’s 4.7 liter V8, still ruled supreme because of better aerodynamics. It was then that Shelby’s in-house artist, Peter Hall Brock, came up with an aerodynamic coupe body, perhaps inspired by the 1962 Aston Martin 212 which was also a fastback with a “ducktail.”

The resulting Daytona coupe then allowed the Cobra to go from around 150 mph (open version) to 170 mph, on a par with the 250GTO.

In 1964, Shelby also experimented with putting in a big block because , to put it bluntly, the 289s often blew up in a long race. The 427 side oiler, tested and proven in NASCAR application, offered more reliability but weighed another 200 lbs. Still Shelby’s ace test driver/mechanic, Ken miles, squeezed one into a leaf sprung chassis and proved it was fast before he crashed it into the only tree adjoining the racetrack in Sebring. The car was upgraded and built into the Flip Top, but this car only served to prove that a new chassis was needed to handle the oodles more torque.

In 1965, Shelby announced the 427 Cobra, a car with the same basic DNA but which was like a 289 on steroids. It had a larger diameter tube frame, designed in Detroit by Klaus Arning and Bob Negstad of Ford which included coil springs and either a 428 Police Interceptor V8 or a 427 side oiler. Back in those days advertising rules were a bit loose, allowing Shelby to sell the 428 powered version as a 427. He kind of liked to reserve the more powerful 427 for those who were going to race or at least were proven sports car pilots. The most collectable of these are the full comp cars, of which there were around 32 made, only four equipped with optional dry sump. The next most collectable are the S/C versions, these started out as Comp cars but when the FIA inspector arrived to count the necessary 100 to confirm it as a production car, and couldn’t find enough, Shelby was left over with a race car that couldn’t run in the Production class. One of his salesmen saved the day by suggesting they put just enough street equipment back on for it to be ruled a production car. Approximately 31 of the race cars were converted to S/C status (though with the passage of time, many street car owners have done the conversion themselves) Just over 358 big block Cobras were made. Shelby’s official website says the last one was made in March, 1967.

Just to make things confusing to newbies who thought that back in the sixties only Shelby made Cobras, AC Cars Ltd, still smarting from the general impression Shelby had created that he had invented the Cobra (giving no credit to the A.C. Ace which had begun production as far back as 1953) , insisted on offering the coil spring big block body style in Europe as an AC car, not as a Shelby. Theirs was called the AC 289 because they didn’t believe, with gas four times the price as in the US there was any market for the 427 Cobra in the UK or on the continent. (Several of these have subsequently been converted to big block FE engines).

A real AC Cobra serial number has a prefix that’s alphabetical.
The official BC Cobra Club gives these
prefix decoders.
(RUN IN BOX)

BUILT BY AC IN ENGLAND:

CSX2000 series: - MK.I and MK.II Cobras (1962-65) sold by Shelby In the United States. Leaf spring suspension. 260 or 289-inch engines. Left-hand drive.

CSX3000 series: - MK.III Cobras (1965-67) sold by Shelby In the United States. Coil spring suspension. 427 or 428 cu inch engines. Left-hand drive.

COB6000 series: - All Cobras (MK.l. II and III) sold in England by AC (1962-1969). MK.III COB Cobras used 289-cu inch engines instead of big-blocks. Right-hand drive.

COX6000 series:- Same as above but sold in Europe or the United States (but not by Shelby). Left-hand drive.

CSX5000 series: - Intended to be used for a special run of Ghia bodied Cobras (1966). Only two made.

AK000 series: - Cobras built by AC and Autokraft since 1982. MK.IV model uses 302 Ford. various engines optional. Most based on MK.III Cobra. but a few MK.II models buIlt as well.

BUILT BY SHELBY IN THE USA:

CSX3000 series:- The Continuation Cobras sold by Shelby the past few years have unused numbers left over from original 427 Cobra production.

CSX4000 series:- The new Shelby component car. MK III chassis. fIberglass body.

CSX 7000 (289 FIA) and CSX 8000 (289 Street) are authentic recreations of the Shelby Cobra 289 models that started it all. The Shelby Cobra legend and racing success began with these cars, terrorizing race tracks around the world from 1962 through 1965. Today's CSX 7000 and CSX 8000 component vehicles incorporate safety and performance improvements without sacrificing driving excitement or originality. CSX 7000 and CSX 8000 bodies are available in fiberglass or aluminum.

OTHERS:

CSX-R4000 series: - Cobra replicas whose manufacturers contribute to Shelby Heart Fund or are otherwise endorsed by Shelby. RAM Automotive in England is the only one at this time.

But is it really a Cobra?
   
Therein lies a conundrum. If you buy all the Cobra books on the market, (see partial list) you see that all of them have various and sundry chassis numbers, many of which don’t began with CSX. For instance the world of Cobra numbering is not as neat and tidy as we would hope. There are 'oddball' cases such as cs2131 (a roadster) and csx2131 (a coupe), and A-98, and HEM-6. If you delve into it more, you find that there were chassis that went here and there for different reasons, such as the Le Mans Coupé a98 + CS2131, but (I think) the CSX2131 Coupé & HEM-6 are counted separately as 'other period Cobras' as they weren`t completed by AC. HEM-6 derives from the company 'High Efficiency Motors' to whom it was supplied as chassis & body by AC. Then there were chassis sold to a film company who were doing a comedy “Monte Carlo or Bust” and at least one of those chassis had the fake antique car body taken off and the chassis shortened to become a “Cobra.” Then too Bob Negstad the Ford Cobra chassis designer moonlighted a job for an electric propulsion company and convinced them to buy some coil spring chassis. Result: more fodder for the reproduced Cobra market though you could argue DNA wise they are true relatives of the AC 427 Cobra. Your best bet is to buy the SAAC registry, and start from there and then to coin the AC Owner’s club registry http://www.racecar.co.uk/acoc/, the Shelby Owners Forum http://www.shelbyforums.com/ and the Club Cobra forum http://www.clubcobra.com/ and start contributing tidbits you find (including pictures).Then when you are at that auction and faced with a real fire-breathing Cobra and you need to check out every facet of the car , you will have some friends online to steer you on the right path before you believe everything the auctioneers say....
 
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The Registries
 
The unquestioned  Bible is SAAC's Registry, which you can find out about by going to http://www.saac.com/worldRegistry/index.html If you want to go that extra mile and obtain a copy of the thin (22 pages originally, 11 pages combined in present form) original Registry published by a group of fans in Grosse Pointe MI back when Cobras were just old used cars, a photocopy (with a new cover for glamor) is available by writing Photojournalistpro@hotmail.com but be forewarned, those writing the subsequent SAAC registry no doubt consulted this one when they began their multi-decade task of documenting AC Cobras so it's possible all the information in the small booklet may be included in the larger hardbound tome. But some prefer to have the original pre-SAAC Register to check out because it was done back in what I call " the days of innocence," when Cobras were merely old used cars without the mega-dollar values attached to finding one that no one knew about. Creating a registry can be a gold mine as this writer can attest, as I was once able to buy several Ferraris for investors by comparing newer Ferrari Owner's Club registries with older Ferrari Owner's club registries and contacting the owners who had dropped out of the club who still owned their cars. While this is unlikely to find in the case of the original Registry since four decades have passed, I would not want to urge an investor in a car to go any further until he has turned over every stone, and established the car's provenance. Is that a word new to you? Well, if you are investing in old cars, it's THE word. prov·e·nance    (prv-nns, -näns) Basically it means place of origin; derivation, proof of authenticity or of past ownership. Used in ascertaining value of art works and antiques.
 

The Author
Wallace A.Wyss, author and fine artist, has authored three books concerning Cobras. Shelby's Wildlife: the Cobras and the Mustangs (MBI 1977), Shelby: The Man The Cars The Legend (Iconografix 2007) and Cobra & Shelby Mustang Photo Archive (Iconografix 2007) His fine art giclees depicting scenes from Shelby lore are available at World Class Motoring,(818) 706-9999 - 5076 Chesebro Rd, Agoura Hills, CA and viewable at legendconnection.org/links.aspx