Posted on 08/18/2012 4:15:43 PM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
Did you see today where #2286 (Daytona Coupe) crashed at Laguna Seca? Badly damaged, but salvageable.
Love my Shelby Series 1! Silver with a maroon stripe. The greatest sound these ears have ever heard!
I should add...
The original Cobra is a far better looking car than ANY Corvette that’s ever been built.
That was Shelby's niche - he took the American hot-rodding, engine-swapping approach to performance, inspired by the similar Cadillac-Allard that he drove in races a decade before he first dropped a Ford V8 into an AC Ace chassis.
Of course, the AC design changed at Shelby's direction. The 289 Coupe was prototyped in the U.S. and shipped to England to be copied, IIRC. Once they'd wrung all they could out of that 289, Shelby's team started playing with the 427 NASCAR engine. To accommodate the larger engine, new suspension and larger wheels, most of the body was changed while retaining the original AC appearance. The most obvious of the changes are the more pronounced fender flares and the larger grille opening. There wasn't much left of the car that AC initially designed underneath.
Interestingly, the 427 Cobra and GT40 were among the first vehicles to benefit from computer-assisted design, thanks to Ford's suspension guru, Klaus Arning, collaborating with a FORTRAN programmer named Chuck Carrig. Henry Ford, II deemed the experiment worthwhile regardless of cost - all part of the effort to stick it to Ferrari.
Arning wanted to put an independent rear suspension in the original Mustang, but the bean-counters nixed it. Those old accountants must get a chuckle out of seeing their successors continuing to use the same playbook.
Technically, the British chassis (with its traverse leaf springs) was found in the early small-block Cobras, but not the big-block cars. Those wore the AC coachwork (modified) but had Ford/Shelby designed frames and suspensions. There were still a lot of European-sourced parts on the 427 cars, though: Girling brakes, Koni shocks, etc.
Found this link on the TX board today.
Just what we need 850 horses under the hood and one jackass behind the wheel.
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