 |
In 1961, Texan racer Carroll Shelby approached AC Cars of Thames Ditton with the idea of fitting a 4.2-litre Ford V8 engine into their handsome Ace sports car. Enter the legendary Cobra, perhaps the most famous muscle car of them all, certainly one of the fastest and definitely the most widely copied: there have been dozens of plastic replicas built over the years.
Using essentially the same tubular-steel chassis layout as the six-cylinder Ace, this two-seater sports car had electrifying performance thanks to the relatively light weight of the body and the high torque of the V8 engine. The first cars used a 164 bhp, 4.2-litre unit but it wasn't long before a bigger, 4727 cc engine was slotted in, boosting power to 195 bhp. Top speed of the 289 cu in car was 138 mph but even more impressive was the acceleration: 60 mph came up in 5.5 seconds, the standing quarter-mile in 13.9 seconds.
This wasn't enough for Shelby, however. In 1965 he slotted in a 6989 cc engine to produce the 7.0-litre Cobra. With a claimed 345 bhp in stock form - tuned SC cars gave 480 bhp or more - it delivered forward thrust that put the Cobra in the record books in 1967 as the world's fastest-accelerating production car, with a 0-60 time of 4.2 seconds. In reality, the 7.0-litre was virtually an all-new Cobra, with fat arches front and rear housing huge Goodyear tyres. It shared only the doors and bonnet with the 289. Moreover, the chassis had been totally redesigned and stiffened while the suspension used coil rather than leaf springs.
Cobra production continues to this day. In the States the cars went under the names of Shelby Cobra and Ford Cobra, and were homologated as Shelby American Cobras.
|
