The AC Cobra was a British roadster shipped to California for its heart
Every early AC Cobra crossed the Atlantic unfinished. Craftsmen in Surrey built and painted the aluminium-bodied cars, then sent them without engines to Carroll Shelby in Los Angeles, where Ford V8s went in. The hybrid became a legend on the road and track, and a money-loser for the companies behind it.
The starting point was the AC Ace, a hand-built two-seater with a steel ladder chassis that AC Cars had been making in small numbers since 1953. It had already run through three straight-six engines, the last a Ford Zephyr unit, and fitting that one had forced a reworked, lower nose. So when Ford handed Shelby two of its new small-block V8s in September 1961 and one went to England, little needed changing. The steering box moved outward to clear the wider engine, and a sturdier rear differential, the same Salisbury unit used on the Jaguar E-Type, took the extra power.
The prototype, chassis CSX2000, was completed at Thames Ditton in January 1962 and flown to Los Angeles, where Shelby's crew dropped in an enlarged 260 cubic inch engine in under eight hours at Dean Moon's shop. The first 75 cars used that size; the next 51 got the 289. In late 1962 AC's chief engineer Alan Turner redesigned the front end for rack-and-pinion steering, borrowing the rack from an MGB and the column from a VW Beetle, and about 528 of these Mark II cars followed.
The brutal Mark III arrived for 1965, with a new chassis developed alongside Ford in Detroit, coil springs all round and a 427 cubic inch engine good for 425 horsepower and 164 mph. It missed out on racing homologation that year, since only 56 of the required 100 cars existed when FIA inspectors arrived in April. Leftovers were converted for the street as semi-competition models, and an original now sells for around 1.5 million dollars.
Not every experiment worked. Ken Miles raced one bigger-engined Mark II at Sebring and judged it virtually undrivable. And for all its fame, the Cobra lost money: Ford and Shelby stopped importing cars from England in 1967, though AC kept selling a small-block roadster in Europe until late 1969.
Source: AC Cobra
