It does indeed. But Shelby didn't design it, a guy named John Tojeiro did, for the English company AC Cars. What Shelby did was to replace the crappy English motor with a Ford V8.
Thanks. I didn’t know that Tojeiro did the coachwork design. So all Shelby did was take a British chassis with British coachwork design and drop in a big block V8?
Yes they did design the body..but it was specially requested by Shelby before Shelby even knew what he wanted to throw into it. He asked them to design a body that would accept a V8. since AC didnt have any that could handle them at the time they had to be built from scratch.
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.