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2012 is an important year in a lot of ways. There is an incredibly important presidential election on the horizon, the Mayans say the world is going to end in December, and most importantly of all, 2012 is the 50th anniversary of the legendary Shelby Cobra. In accordance with this important landmark, there will be a Ford-Cobra-Shelby Reunion show April 19th-21st at the Pomona Road Race track in California.
Hemmings Auto Blog reports that among the many high-priced Shelbys and Cobras on hand will be two or the three remaining King Cobra mid-engine race cars. These are cars that rarely see the light of day, so this could be your one and only chance to check them out.
As the story goes, Carroll Shelby was eager to compete against the increasingly-dominant mid-engine sportscars of Europe. So he used a formula similar to the success he experienced with the original Shelby Cobra; take a British chassis and install an America V8. In this case the chassis was a custom Cooper T61M tube chassis, which were often the recipients of engine swaps anyways.
Featuring a 289 V8 similar to the one used in the Cobra, just eight “King Cobras” as they were called by the motoring press, were ever built. Shelby eventually abandoned the program to work on the Ford-backed GT40 project, another famous mid-engine race car. Today it is estimated that just three King Cobras remain, and two of them will be at the Shelby Reunion in April. If you’ve never seen one in person, this may be your first and last chance to do so; so don’t miss out!
