"There is nothing nice about a Cobra. It's stripped down to the essentials, a big engine, a small car, and four wide tires to keep the whole business on the pavement. It's loud, smells like gasoline, and shakes, shudders, and bucks. It makes your arms tired and your feet hot. You nearly crash about once every 10 minutes. It's so damn wonderful that you can't believe it."

Ron

Ron

Ron

Do I get an "A" in my Cobra trivia? LOL!

Last Edited on 19-Feb-2008 11:22 AM

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"There is nothing nice about a Cobra. It's stripped down to the essentials, a big engine, a small car, and four wide tires to keep the whole business on the pavement. It's loud, smells like gasoline, and shakes, shudders, and bucks. It makes your arms tired and your feet hot. You nearly crash about once every 10 minutes. It's so damn wonderful that you can't believe it."

Nice to see you back posting. Now tell us some stories about the time you were working.

Ron

Last Edited on 20-Feb-2008 6:27 AM

Is that the theme to the Twilight Zone I hear in the background? I thought we agreed, no four letter words! "work (ing)"
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"There is nothing nice about a Cobra. It's stripped down to the essentials, a big engine, a small car, and four wide tires to keep the whole business on the pavement. It's loud, smells like gasoline, and shakes, shudders, and bucks. It makes your arms tired and your feet hot. You nearly crash about once every 10 minutes. It's so damn wonderful that you can't believe it."

Last Edited on 20-Feb-2008 11:04 AM

I think Nomad tends to exagarate. Working as a towel boy in a house of ill repute has far more side benefits than that. Remember I don't live live that far from Reno and the Old Mustang Ranch. The worst thing Nevada did was to put them out of business. Now the state may have to start a state income tax with revenues dropping from the gambling.

Ron

Last Edited on 23-Feb-2008 5:34 AM

Eye don't no if hee can writ enythang about hiz Kar, becuz he iz illiterate, and hee can't reed either. He took a Correspondence Reading Course, but he couldn't read a damn thing they sent him.

Those are both great articles. I wish I still had some of my old car magazines from the early 60s as they had some great stories in them about the Cobras. I remember one magazine that was not at all friendly about the Cobra until after they got to drive one and try it out. Their first complaint was no spare. They just didn't know where it was.

Ron

Shelby had a saying he used to like to use back in those days. We sell cars to make money to race, not to be a car manufacturer. And they would use whatever happened to be in reach at the time. I have even seen a couple of the early 289 cars with two makes of gages in them. But considering that his shop at LAX used to look more like a junk yard than a car shop, they made some pretty decent cars. They did clock the gages on their race cars, but that was just for the drivers benefit. That is another reason for the big fight now between Shelby and the SAAC. Right now the SAAC is the only body in the world that can certify if you have a legitimate Shelby Mustang from that era. The Shelby tag was just put on right over the Ford VIN # and there was no logical sequence to them. Say whoever was working on Mustang # 1 that Ford had sent finished after whoever was working on Mustang #15, that Mustang would have a higher Shelby SFM number than the one with the higher Ford VIN number. Ford turned over all the VIN numbers they sent to Shelby to the SAAC and they have all the Shelby SFM numbers and know which ones went to which Mustang. That is one car that it is impossible to build a clone of and get it certified because of the mixture of numbers. There have been a couple of instances of people looking in the registry and finding a gap in the CSX numbers and trying to pass off one they built as an original. But they weren't to good at it as they didn't know all the places that Shelby had the CSX numbers stamped.

Ron

An interesting article and it was in the papers out here at one time. Note that down in the left hand column a ways there is a name that may be of interest to you.

Ron

That is a great article and the pictures are fantastic. It is sad that most of the old great drivers and peope are gone or about to leave us. They have so much we could learn from.

Ron

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"There is nothing nice about a Cobra. It's stripped down to the essentials, a big engine, a small car, and four wide tires to keep the whole business on the pavement. It's loud, smells like gasoline, and shakes, shudders, and bucks. It makes your arms tired and your feet hot. You nearly crash about once every 10 minutes. It's so damn wonderful that you can't believe it."

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"There is nothing nice about a Cobra. It's stripped down to the essentials, a big engine, a small car, and four wide tires to keep the whole business on the pavement. It's loud, smells like gasoline, and shakes, shudders, and bucks. It makes your arms tired and your feet hot. You nearly crash about once every 10 minutes. It's so damn wonderful that you can't believe it."

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"There is nothing nice about a Cobra. It's stripped down to the essentials, a big engine, a small car, and four wide tires to keep the whole business on the pavement. It's loud, smells like gasoline, and shakes, shudders, and bucks. It makes your arms tired and your feet hot. You nearly crash about once every 10 minutes. It's so damn wonderful that you can't believe it."

Meanwhile as I keep up on my Triumph research and visit the blogs (like this) often. I discovered some interesting news. I thought it was sort of related to Cobra since the AC history and British thing and all. Most Cobra lovers seem to also appreciate the look of a TR6 anyway. Also car people enjoy all kinds of new auto info, so pardon the break from Cobra news.

Well after the announcement of a Chinese auto firm buying and re-building the MG line, another large auto maker wasn't going to sit down looking. It seems that a very popular auto maker who already has success in bringing back a old Brit car is doing it again. YUP!!!! BMW who resurrected the Mini and now is going to try the same with Triumph.

The Triumph world is partial on the new look as am I. It kind of looks like a cross between a Honda 2000, a Saturn Sky and a Miata...But if it has BMW guts it should be worth a drive. Have a look folks, tell me what you think?
either way it looks like the world loves roadsters and they are on a comeback....(Thank God, that means mini vans will decline in popularity)

http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/news/autoexpressnews/210892/triumph.html

Last Edited on 26-Mar-2008 8:57 PM

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"There is nothing nice about a Cobra. It's stripped down to the essentials, a big engine, a small car, and four wide tires to keep the whole business on the pavement. It's loud, smells like gasoline, and shakes, shudders, and bucks. It makes your arms tired and your feet hot. You nearly crash about once every 10 minutes. It's so damn wonderful that you can't believe it."

Last Edited on 28-Mar-2008 12:53 PM

Last Edited on 5-Apr-2008 1:18 PM

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"There is nothing nice about a Cobra. It's stripped down to the essentials, a big engine, a small car, and four wide tires to keep the whole business on the pavement. It's loud, smells like gasoline, and shakes, shudders, and bucks. It makes your arms tired and your feet hot. You nearly crash about once every 10 minutes. It's so damn wonderful that you can't believe it."

You contribute just by being here. It is really nice to be able to come to a site and post and there are no big fights going on. I do spend a lot of time at CC and other sites and they always have some people fighting over something.

Ron

I looked and may have missed it, but this link was posted over on CC this morning and has some good pictures and history of the AC cars evolving into the Shelby Cobras. Also some very nice pictures of other cars.

http://www.ritzsite.net that

Ron