AC Cobra
A British roadster, an American V8, and a Texan's idea that humbled Ferrari.
The Cobra was a brilliantly simple act of matchmaking. Carroll Shelby, a Texan ex-racer, took the lithe British AC Ace and dropped in a lightweight Ford V8 — European chassis, American muscle. The first cars, from 1962, used a small 260-cubic-inch V8, soon enlarged to 289; the fearsome later Mark III used Ford's 7.0-litre, 427-cubic-inch big block making 425 hp in a car that weighed almost nothing.
The result was violently fast and gorgeous, and it went racing immediately. Shelby's Cobras took the fight to Ferrari on both sides of the Atlantic, winning at Le Mans in class and eventually helping Ford wage its wider war on Maranello. Only around 998 of the originals were built between 1962 and 1968.
Endlessly copied and never bettered, the Cobra is the definitive Anglo-American hot rod — proof that the right engine in the right body can rewrite the order of things.
The AC Cobra, sold in the United States as the Shelby Cobra and Shelby AC Cobra, is a sports car manufactured by British company AC Cars, with a Ford V8 engine. It was produced intermittently in both the United Kingdom and later the United States from 1962 to 1967.
Text adapted from “AC Cobra” on Wikipedia ↗ · CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗ · retrieved 2026-07
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Matched on body class, era and origin from register data — never hand-picked.