DOUBLE TEST: COBRAS FOR STREET & COMPETITION November 1965 BY JOHN CHRISTY & JERRY TITUS AS A NUMBER OF PEOPLE HAVE FOUND OUT, when you have a world beater on your hands, be it automobile or outhouse, you don't just sit back on your laurels and expect people to let you get away with it. So it was, and is, with Carroll Shelby and the Cobra. In 1964 and 1965. Shelby had the Production car world by the tail with his 289 Ford-powered "snake." Except in very, very rare instances, where all-out effort was coupled with all-out driving ability, the Cobra was unbeatable. It didn't look as though anybody who would, could beat it, and those who possibly could, wouldn't.

Nobody could have blamed Shelby if he had sat back and rested on his and his crew's achievements. But Carroll & Co., including such foxy types as Ken Miles, have been around a good while. As we said, 1964 was strictly "The Year of the Snake", but since the day when we walked into a small stall shop and helped put the finishing touches on totally unpainted Cobra #1, we've made a point of keeping an eye on the ever-growing snake pit. So it was that at Sebring in 1964, even though we had other fish to fry (somewhat inauspiciously) we made a special effort to be around the Cobra quarters, having heard earlier that the ubiquitous Mr. Miles had shoehorned a monstrous Grand National type 427 C.I. Ford into one of the team cars. Sure enough, he had. He had also managed to mow down the only tree in five acres of open ground when the beast got away from him coming out of the Esses in an early practice session, and was busily pounding out the divots in the car when we made the scene. We decided this was no time for idle conversation and went elsewhere to attend to our own machinery.

The NASCAR 427 Engine The street version costs $7495 and is just about complete for that use. The competition version - as tested - costs $9500. but options needed for specific types of races -can raise its cost a bit more.  The light-weight version of the powerful 427 used in the race cars has aluminum heads and other parts to make it some 80 lbs. lighter.

During practice we made it a habit to glance nervously in the mirror when coming out onto a straight. If what we saw in the glass was blue with white stripes (or red) we moved over right now, due to the fact that whatever it was, was going to overtake right now. On one occasion we looked in the mirror, saw something blue with white stripes. We moved over and waited, and waited, and waited. We waited until we got about two thirds of the way down the straight. Suddenly there was this godawful explosive roar and our car picked itself up and set itself down at what felt like about three feet to the right. So thing blue with white stripes disappearing around the next turn. Ahrrgh! The next question was if he going so bloody fast why did it take him so blasted long to get there? We found out the answer later. Every time Ken rounded a bend and headed down a straight the beast just sat and scratched until, eventually, it caught a bite, at which point everything was peachy keen until the next turn. So much for history; suffice it to say that the debuts of both cars, his and ours, were somewhat less than satisfactory. Tires available at the time and the buggy spring suspension of the older Cobra just weren't up to handling the 480-odd Percherons that lived under the hood. It also got more than somewhat warm in the cockpit.

Strong magnesium wheels of the pin-drive type, with knock-off hubs are standard on the Cobra. Fully instrumented cockpit is simple and neat in the very best of performance-car tradition. Editor Christy barrels the street version in an uphill turn on the fast Riverside circuit. The street car is equipped with an electric fan for emergency use in hot-summer traffic The racing version has its oil cooler mounted in a rather vulnerable position under grille.

The second appearance of this monster, widened, beefed, vented and with much bigger tires was Nassau '64. It still had buggy springs but not much else was the same. It went like the hammers and was only beaten, and just, by a lightweight CS Sting Ray in the hands of Roger Penske, and then only because some chassis bits broke up and Ken had to slow down. We thought it still had to be only an exercise and something to keep the Shelby competition department busy till odd off moments. Surely ol' Shel wasn't actually planning to build 100 of these brutes and turn them loose on the body politic? He for dadburn sure was! Fun is fun, but Shelby wasn't spending loot sending that brute around to odd parts of the world just for the kicks of seeing Miles stuff his hoof into more horsepower than most people use in a lifetime. If the car was going to qualify for SCCA production racing he had to abide by the rules and build street machines. One full hundred of them. By this time Miles and Jim Benavides the project engineer had decided that this could not be just a mod job on the older 289. It had to look like a Cobra I, but that was about all. So they started with a relatively clean sheet of paper and built a new car.

First, Shelby's comment that "it works'' notwithstanding, that transverse leaf spring suspension had to go. Second, everything else had to be bigger and stronger to take the torque and the heft of the giant 427 inch power plant, a unit that was designed to push 4,000 pounds of brick-like sedan at 170 mph. In fact everything had to go but one item -surprisingly enough the standard Salisbury rear-end used in the 289 was found to be more than sufficient.

There can be few complaints about trunk space in the street version.  It has lots of room. Hidden the upper/right corner of the race-car trunk is a pair of heavy-duty fuel pumps.

The street machine, top, has big 10.75" discs with unequal-arm suspension, coil/shocks, and front swaybar.  Duckt avove brings fresh air to the cockpit.  Notice the full undercoating. The race car, above, is equipped with binders over 11.5" in diameter and heavy-duty calipers to make it well able to handle the potential of the engine.  Fiberglass duct brings in cool air.

Integral coil-shocks, as used on virtually all modern race cars, were selected both for compactness and ease of adjustment for chassis tuning. This, naturally, necessitated a complete redesign of the front and rear structures to carry the necessary upper A-arms that replaced the leaf springs which formerly located the upper ends of the hub carriers. The frame tubes went from three to four inches in diameter and were moved 22 inches apart, from the original 17 as on the 289. The body design is that of the 1965 competition version and drops straight to the frame tubes instead of tucking under as before. To make room for the bigger bellhousing the pedal support box no longer straddles the frame, but is moved out with the widened tubes, thus offsetting the pedals to the left. This is disconcerting at first, but can be gotten used to in a day or so.   Fully independent rear suspension is now the feature of the Cobra, above,  via the addition of upper A-arm.  Armstrong coil/shocks are adjustable to both car-height and dampening setting required.

Bigger hubs carrying bigger, more widely spaced bearings, taper instead roller, are used in the 427. Bigger, much stronger half-shafts are used and, though these are splined, the rear suspension geometry is such that only 0.020 of an inch of spline of spline movement occurs in spite of more than six inches of wheel travel allowed. Designing the axle for spline travel would have been useless in any event, according to Miles. since splines would bind up solidly under the brutal torque of the big-incher. For the street machine, the suspension mountings are in rubber, and an option of bronze bushings is set up for the race car. In the street the engine is an out-of-the-box Grand National 427. fitted with two AFB Holley carburetors as used in the Mustang. These have fairly small primary venturis and big secondaries. Thus the street Cobra is fed gently at the outset and is, if nothing, more docile than the 289, if one remembers that the first throttle stop is only a detent to remind you that the big secondary vents are about to open. On the race car the feeding is done by one great huge Holley 780 CFM as used on NASCAR machinery, sitting in a bathtub-like cold air box. Even this one s fairly docile at first, but it comes on much more rapidly. The carburetors on the dual set-up tend to flood or starve on very tight turns; the big single, with its concentric float, does not - most definitely not.

The street version, with its smaller-section tires, develops some oversteer when acceleration through a corner, but its manners are exceptionally mild for such a hot performer.

So it's docile at first. However, if one is in either of the two lower rears one is advised to make sure the rear end has caught a bite before one goes beyond that first throttle detent. This Hawg will lay great huge strips of rubber if treated disrespectfully at any speed in either first or second, and will even do it in third gear if it is the least bit out of shape. Treated with respect, the 427 is very smooth and very deceptively fast in either top speed or acceleration.

Above: Titus caught in the act!  With low tire pressure, the race cars's understeer used more road than he figured on.  the photog was glad he'd used a mild telephoto lens, too.

Once upon a time. Aston Martin made a big thing out of going from zero to 100 and hack to zero in less than 30 seconds. Ken Miles took one of the street 427 machines out and did zero to 100 to zero in 13.2 seconds. This was done on concrete. On asphalt things get a bit slicker. Due to wheel spin with the street tires (Goodyear Blue Dots), and the fact that the straight at Riverside had been used for a big drag meet wherein several cars had grunched on the line, the best we could get with the street machine was 110 mph in 13.2 seconds through the quarter. It was the first street machine we'd ever driven that would keep the tires lit up for the full quarter in every gear. The race car, with its "blueprinted" engine and huge rear tires, got a full second off of that, blasting through the trap at 6500 in third gear. At one point we were entering a freeway and pausing at the entrance. Our passenger looked at the traffic and commented "Careful, the traffic is moving pretty fast - wasn't it! That was how long it took to get up to and above the normal 70 mph flow of cars. To be very blunt about it, we do not advise those not extremely well-versed in the Cobra mystique to try the shenanigans conducted by Ken Miles in this car.

The street 427 has two Ford-made frour-barrels supplying fuel to the powerful engine.  This setup produces almost as much torque at the bottom end as the competition version does.

Looked at as a whole, the Cobra 427 is not a machine for general transportation. It is, rather the latest example, and very probably the pinnacle, of that vanishing breed, the pure sports roadster. Its water-tight integrity is on the minimal side, and it wouldn't be much fun to drive in most urban areas, particularly east of the Mississippi. It can be used for travel and there is considerably more room in both trunk and cockpit than in past versions, but best the weather be good and the spaces traveled be wide. Our test car of the street version was bright red and we were thankful that in our area the law enforcement agencies are reasonably tolerant of such machinery, and that the exhaust system of the 427 is virtually silent except at full throttle. Painted red, this car is one that in some areas could get you a ticket while parked in a driveway. To sum up, our early misgivings to the contrary, the Cobra 427 rides comfortably and is bags of fun as long as one puts the brain in gear before putting the car in gear. One might get a bit wall-eyed keeping one eye on the road and the other on the rear view mirror, but that's been the name of the game for years, and a small price to pay for the privilege of driving a machine not seen on the road since the days of the Mercedes race cars of the 1930's. We tested both the street version and the track machine. For this last, we will now turn you over to Jerry Titus:

The racing 427 uses a single Holley with its centerpivot floats.  It has a rating of 780 cubic feet per minute.  Output from the 7000cc monster is 485 horses with 480 lb.ft. torque.

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