The Cobra is of course iconic and legendary. But that certainly wasn’t the case in 1963 when the first Cobras were built, and not in the way you might expect: the chassis/body was shipped from the UK to a participating American Ford dealer who then installed the modified 260 CID V8 and B/W T-10 transmission. The Cobra was designed almost exclusively to be a highly potent SCCA racer, thanks to its phenomenal power-to-weight ratio and excellent chassis. But would it have any success beyond that? That was very much an open question at the time, one that C/D could only speculate on.
Right from the start, C/D states that the Cobra attained higher performance figures than any other car they had ever tested. And this was with the “street engine”, a 260 hp version of the 260 V8. The hotter 289 and the ultimate 427 were still twinkles in Carrol Shelby’s snake-eyes.
The AC Ace first saw the light of day in 1954, so it wasn’t exactly all that new. But designer John Tojeiro blessed the Ace with a very light frame made up of two large primary tubes with ample cross-bracing and a light tube skeleton for the aluminum skin. Tojeiro designed the body too, obviously with a close eye on Ferraris of the early ’50s. The Ace started life with an ancient long-stroke ohv 2 L six, then in 1956 it got the less-ancient Bristol BMW-derived 2L six. And then in 1961 it got its first Ford engine, the 2.6 Zephyr six.
More on the Ford V8 later. C/D points out that while the Cobra is almost perfectly attuned to the needs of successful SCCA racing, it was inevitably compromised as a street car. The gearing was not ideal for traffic, and a 5-speed with a lower first gear would be an improvement, given that the tuned V8 gave its maximum torque at a very high 4800 rpm. There was a pretty serious issue with the generator not putting out enough current for the car’s needs in traffic, but an alternator would soon fix that. The very limited steering lock made tight turns and parking challenging, and the 1 2/3 turns lock-to-lock made for heavy steering at low speed. The cockpit was cramped, and the right leg was not always happy in its position. This of course a functionally obsolete early ’50s body, like an MG-A.
We are of course very familiar with the Ford small-block V8, but it was heady new stuff in 1963. Its very compact dimensions and light weight were unparalleled at the time, and made it highly suitable for the task at hand. The engine tested did not have the four Weber carbs as shown above; it had a large four barrel Holley carb, higher 10:1 compression, and a hotter cam. The racing version with the four Webers was rated at 335 hp. Given that it weighed a mere 2,120 lbs, it was obviously going to have superlative performance.
Somewhat unusual for the early ’50s, Tojiero blessed the AC Ace with four wheel independent suspension, and not with swing axles on the rear. Both front and rear had lower wishbones with a transverse leaf spring functioning as both the upper control arm and of course the spring. The rear wheels had an initial 3 degrees of negative camber. The result was a very firm ride at lower speeds, but one that came into its own above 50 mph. Cornering power was about as high as possible for the times, with its race-oriented Goodyear Blue Streak bias-ply tires (6.50-15 front; 6.70-15 rear). Note: the 427 Cobra had a completely revised/new chassis and suspension.
Handling was of course excellent: “At high speeds, the driver begins to feel like an integral part of the machine.” Unfortunately the driving position was not so ideal.
The four unassisted disc brakes were up to the job, the biggest risk being in applying too much pressure to the unusual AC pedals that were double-hinged.
The question as to how such an overwhelmingly powerful and fast 150 mph machine fits into the scheme of contemporary road use, C/D pointed out that things like utterly effortless passing and merging can be a safety factor.
C/D sums in pointing out that the Cobra is not as sophisticated and well-integrated as others, but its raw performance may well overcome that limitation. The big question was if the Cobra could become a commercial success. No worries on that account. You can still buy a new one today.
No acceleration number were spelled out, but from this very steep chart it looks like 0-60 came in a brisk 4.5 seconds or so.
Despite any short comings, this Cobra is by far my favorite. Straight forward and elegant in its own way. Unpretentious.
I love the Cobra, but it really was a compromised vehicle for daily use. For the same money or less you could get a C2 Corvette in open (with a real top and roll up windows) or closed form and option it with A/C, PS, PB, PW, leather seats, and even Powerglide if you wanted comfort, or get the FI 327 and other go fast options to nip at the heels of the Cobra, but still with a lot more comfort and daily usability. The Cobra won the race track (and in subsequent valuations as a collector car), but the Corvette won big on the showroom floor, which is what GM was mostly interested in. And I haven’t even mentioned the E-Type Jag and 230SL also available for about the same money – talk about a richness of good choices for 1963 sports car buyers with some money burning a hole in their pocket.
There was an article here on CC on the rather sleazy way Ford got a car that really wasn’t assembled as a mass-production vehicle to qualify for racetrack duty in the same manner as the Corvette.
While true, the Cobra vs. Corvette situation actually still worked out quite well for GM. Yeah, the Cobra bested the Corvette on the track, but I have no doubt that the publicity gained by the feud, even though the Corvette was on the losing end on the track, was a quite positive thing for Corvette sales in the showroom. For the same price as a rough Cobra, one could get a very nice, well-equipped, road-going GT in the Corvette. Want to take a long, interstate road-trip? No one is going to want to do that in a Cobra, but it wouldn’t be bad in a Corvette.
IOW, it’s the usual ‘there is no such thing as bad publicity’.
Such a pretty device, with all of its engines over time, with the exception of the 427 jobs, which always to me looked as if some particularly dim hot-rodder had decided to “improve” the looks by fattening and widening the arches and thus manly-ing it up in the crudest way (and no, I wouldn’t want to drive a 427 without wheels at least that wide!)
The spec chart says 0-60 varied from 4.4 to 5.5 secs, probably reflecting the difficult drivability mentioned, and indeed, the chart indicates that top-endiness with a 0-100 time of about 11 seconds! Holy moly, and it handled too! No wonder the thing became such a legend.
The Cobra is another one of those classic cars where the legend is a bit distant from reality. Yeah, they were terrors on the racetrack, but that didn’t translate well to the street, something that had to be done to qualify them for homologation racing.
The main issue was the twitchy nature of the steering which, with a superb power-to-weight ratio that made them great for a professional driver, would seem to make them quite dangerous in the hands of a much more typical, average driver/owner.
I’d love to test drive one .
-Nate
Ah lovely. I so love the small block Cobra over the cartoonish big block cars.
I’d never known that Cobras have their pedal pivots under the floorboards, and had I ever heard of John Tojeiro before?
I think I need to go with Nate on that test drive. 🙂
If you’ve never read it Peter Egan wrote a great road trip story about a 289 Cobra:
https://www.erareplicas.com/history/r_and_t_289cruise/cruise1.htm
I’m not sure about the how and the why, but this 260-4v powered Cobra proved to be about the quickest one ever tested, including the 427SC models.
Was it really even intended to be a street car, outside of homolgation purposes? The Rip Chords famously “took my Cobra down to the track, hitched to the back of my Cadillac”.
I’m guessing there were reasons that they didn’t want to just *drive* their Cobra to the track.
According to Hemmings, a total of 998 small block and big block Cobras were built by Shelby, back in the day. I’m not sure one can call that any form of a commercial success (except perhaps by small British car manufacturer measures, which is what AC Cars was, when it was supplying cars to Shelby for drivetrain installations). As a “halo car” (which reflects well on Ford’s and Shelby’s broader product lines and brands), the Cobra roadster had and has few peers.
As to the.Cobra roadster versus the C2 Corvette, think of the Shelby as a race car that one can drive on the street, while the Vette is a street car that one can take to the race track.
My first thought is that the biggest beneficiary of the Cobra’s success (outside of its racing career and from a retail perspective) was the Sunbeam Tiger. The Cobra proved the bona fides of the new small Ford V8 and the Sunbeam Alpine was a more civilized package to pack it into. 7k still isn’t a lot of cars, but it was about 7x more popular with buyers than the Cobra turned out to be.
Good call on the Tiger. Chrysler evidently tried to jam their LA V8 into the engine bay when they got a controlling interest in the Rootes Group to continue the series, but it wasn’t nearly as narrow as the Ford smallblock, so 1967 was the last year for the Tiger.
Seems like another good topic for CC discusssion, i.e., a comparison of the Big 3’s small-block V8 engines, particularly the reason the Ford was so much narrower than the Chevy or Mopar (and the pros and cons of each design).
I had forgotten that the first Cobras were built fairly early in 1963. My preference has always been with the 289 version – a little more grunt than the 260, but without the total wildness of the 427.
This was an interesting read!
The 427 had a far superior chassis that actually made it a less treacherous car to drive. Plenty of them had 428CJ engines that weren’t exactly fire-breathers instead of the racing 427 side-oilers too. The 289 cars were 1953 roadsters stuffed with three times the power that they were originally designed for. The 427s basically just looked like AC Aces. Under the skin they had rigid, square tube chassis and they even enjoyed the luxury of real upper control arms.
The Cobra was more of a spiritual successor to the 56-57 era Corvette I feel; a crude rude beautiful and fast roadster, made exactly for the people who made sports cars appealing to the masses in the first place, C2s were sexy but for every one taken to the track to go head to head with Cobras there were probably 1000 more that were just fashion statements for affluent owners, driven no sportier than the boulevarder Ford Thunderbirds their peers drove. The Cobra was the genuine article, there’s no posing or fluff with it, a large portion of the people who bought them really did so to campaign them, and the ones who didn’t legitimately had the fastest car on the street.
Sales wise the C2 ate its lunch, of course it did, it’s David and Goliath, but looking at the bigger picture the Cobra single handedly revived Ford’s performance credibility, the small block was easily the small block Chevy’s equal in every way(if not improved upon) and the Cobra was the car that showcased its potential to the world. The Cobra didn’t need to sell in mass quantities to be successful, it kicked the Corvettes butt and the powerplant that made it possible was also in the new small Fairlane, then Falcon, then or course Mustang and in GT350 form tuned by the very same outfit building the Cobras and behind Ford’s dominant racing development, which itself was also a crude rude Corvette beater in its original hardcore 1965 form. The Cobras reputation and that extension of the “Cobra” name at Shelby may well have cemented the Mustang’s longterm success, without it the Mustang may have passed like the many models of the rest of the ponycar fad eventually did, but that Shelby lineage always gave it credibility even when it didn’t often deserve it(like the Cobra II). Likewise the Torino Cobra or the Cobra Jet engines all tied into the Cobra’s reputation. If there was ever a halo car success story, it was the Cobra, if there was ever a single model that defined Ford’s domestic and international “total performance” era it was the Anglo/American hybrid that was the Cobra.
The Cobra roadster was certainly a strong and early candidate for Ford’s “total performance” program, but I can make an argument that the GT-40 and associated Le Mans/endurance racing programs were the pinnacle. Shelby did have involvement in that program as well.
it is astonishing how broadly and successfully Ford participated and won in big-time motorsports in the 1960’s into the early 1970’s. Chrysler was an overdog in Nascar, but Ford had a strong program as well, that fully ran with the Mopars most of the time. Meanwhile GM mostly got the hobbyists and weekend warriors with their cheap and simple small block Chevy.
There was also the Indy car engine program, along with the Lotus-Ford car-construction efforts. Then there were the Lotus-Ford Cortinas. Don’t forget the Ford-Cosworth Formula 1 engine, which absolutely dominated in the early ’70s. Decades of smaller and successful Cosworth-Ford engines were created during that partnership. Ford was a strong player in Trans-Am with the Mustangs, with which Shelby was involved with early on. As drag racing became bigger-time in the late 1960’s, Ford Gassers and other high profile drag racers helped lead the way. The SCCA Formula Ford racing program was the most durably successful niche racing class for the racing hobbyist.
Was there ever a big-time factory effort that was so comprehensive, so spread out among so many forms of motorsports, and so consistently successful as what Ford put together for those few “peak” motorsports years of the 1960’s and early 1970’s? I can’t think of any manufacturer who has even come close.
While recognizing the strength of the Cobra cars and of the brand, I would humbly vote for the GT-40 and the successor “Mark IV” as the pinnacle of Ford’s efforts. It is also hard to discount the dominance and importance of Ford’s Indy car and Formula 1 engine efforts of that era as well. I don’t think we will ever see a manufacturer take on so many big-time motorsports programs (and succeed at them) as Ford once did.
“The Cobra roadster was certainly a strong and early candidate for Ford’s “total performance” program, but I can make an argument that the GT-40 and associated Le Mans/endurance racing programs were the pinnacle. Shelby did have involvement in that program as well.”
Ford’s 1964 Le Mans effort was a total flop. Carroll Shelby and Shelby American took that pig and made it a world beater race car. The GT-40 would most likely have won in 1965, but FoMoCo executives insisted the engines be swapped out with factory built engines which contained defective head bolts.
In the era of 1960-1969 only 2 manufacturers won Le Mans. Ferrari in 1960-65 and Ford 1966-1969. 1968 & 1969 wins weren’t even truly supported by Ford.
Keep in mind also, that in 1965, the Shelby Daytona come with-in a cats butt of winning Le Mans overall. They did win their division & the championship. That’s when the Deuce told Carroll to forget his jalopies and concentrate on the GT-40. Shelby had instructed that the Daytonas should be dumped in the English Channel. Alan Mann couldn’t stand that thought, so he paid to ship the Daytonas back to the US.
I 100% agree that no manufacturer had ever dominated racing the way FoMoCo did in 1963-1969 (Total Performance Era) and probably will never again.
Where I give it to the Cobra is it was a true street/track car, it may have been very limited in its production but compared to the volume of GT40 street models it may as well be a Corolla. The GT40 undoubtedly might be the car that best represents highest highs of the total performance campaign, but it really was a racecar first and foremost something for fans to root for rather than yearn for as a dream car, as were the Cobra Daytona coupes in fairness. The Cobra roadster however was the Swiss army performance car, it performed like European exotics, it had acceleration to battle the top heap of muscle cars, it wasn’t complex to own and maintain with its conventional mills and of course it was stylish and beautiful with a great name.