I just spoke with Peter P. and he is still planning to take my car to Carlisle.
One other question for the group. What do you think of the "Carroll Shelby Motors" license plate frame? I'm tending to lean against it but am curious to know how others feel. Thanks!
BTW, current plan is to take the train to Connecticut Saturday morning, take delivery and drive the car back to New York. Hoping for a nice day! It is three years this month since I first started thinking about an ERA, inspired by this article in the New York Times:
A Carrot? A Stick? No, a Cobra
Mark Rabiner for The New York Times
Tim and Fred Heiler with the Cobra replica they built as a reward for Tim's good grades.
Published: May 25, 2008
IN 2001, our son, Tim, was a smart middle-schooler who, like many of his peers, wasn’t meeting his parents’ expectations. We thought he should be getting better grades, but distractions always seemed to get in the way: video games, roller hockey, Magic cards, girls, video games, TV and cars. Did I mention video games?
The Making of a Snake
But we found it tough to be firm with him. Our only child, Tim was engaging, entertaining and had traveled a lot with his mother and me. We really enjoyed his company.
Although he wouldn’t be driving for years, he was already a car fanatic, and he talked incessantly about the Shelby 427 Cobra. “Dad,” he would say, “it’s the sickest car ever made!”
By accident, I took advantage of Tim’s Cobra obsession, making the car an incentive that turned an unfocused teenager into a high school honor student. Tim is now a college sophomore, and a Cobra replica — built by us — is in our garage.
By middle school, Tim had decorated his room with posters of a 1950s Corvette, a Porsche 959 and a Mini Cooper tuner car.
I had thought I preferred the sturdy curves of a Porsche 356, but Tim convinced me about the hot looks of the Shelby 427 Cobra. Not to be confused with a procession of Ford Mustangs that later appropriated the name, this two-seat convertible was sleek, voluptuous and vaguely menacing.
In the early 1960s, Carroll Shelby hoped to build an unbeatable racecar by squeezing a large American V-8 into a small British sports car. He started with a demure convertible from the AC Company and added large fender flares to make room for wide wheels and tires. Shelby shoehorned a Ford V-8 into the car, along with the rear suspension and drive gears from a Jaguar XKE. The half-breed car was impressive on the track, so Shelby and AC decided to make street versions.
Fewer than 1,000 were built, but the Cobra became one of those larger-than-life legends that spawned a zillion hot-rodder stories and helped to inflate the car’s value as a highly desirable collectible. There’s nothing like a high-powered, pretty car made in very low numbers to run up prices. The car cost less than $6,000 in the mid-1960s, but a nice but not-so-special one sold for more than $800,000 at a recent auction.
The car’s history has fueled an industry that makes relatively low-cost Cobra replicas. There are now perhaps two dozen companies turning out about 1,200 replicas a year; prices range from about $12,000 for a very basic kit, to $45,000 for a complete, self-assembled fiberglass car like ours, to $110,000 for a ready-to-drive car with an aluminum body. Some are excellent and others mediocre, but most can be screwed together well enough to make it hard to tell the replica from the original.
And so it started. Tim studied Web sites, gathered literature and queried my car-freak friends and his own. Why should I object? At least he was reading more.
He found a replica company, ERA, in New Britain, Conn. “More than anything else in the world, I’d love to buy and build an ERA Cobra,” he told me. “O.K., bud,” I said in a weak moment, “if you get on the honor roll and stay on throughout high school, we’ll buy you a Cobra kit when you graduate.” I didn’t think it would happen, but I felt it would be worthwhile to give him an incentive.
Indeed, he began to apply himself in school, and in a couple of marking periods we got a congratulatory note and an honor roll sticker with his report card. His mom, Lynn, and I were ecstatic. Good grades became the norm all through high school, and Tim often reminded me of my promise. I began to think, “We might really have to do this.”
He graduated from high school knowing he’d earned his car, and in 2006 entered Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., as a freshman.
When I picked him up for his freshman Thanksgiving break, we visited ERA’s Connecticut shop and saw where they mold fiberglass bodies, jig-weld box-section steel frames and build cars for customers who don’t want to do their own. At the end of our tour, we put down a $500 deposit on the next available set of parts.
In June, the morning after Tim arrived home from college for the summer, a Nascar-type tractor-trailer arrived at our home in rural Pennsylvania. A bare fiberglass body and a black-powder-coated frame rolled out on dolly wheels, and we helped unload about 20 cartons of parts. It felt like having Christmas in the summer as we unpacked the boxes and covered two bays of our garage with serious-looking parts.
The kit was remarkably complete, right down to well-marked bags of nuts and bolts. It also came with a step-by-step manual and a statement that normal hand tools and about 100 hours of work would get the job done.
Neither of us is a master mechanic, but I had worked in a shop during summers when I taught junior high school, and he had twisted wrenches at a repair shop for two summers. After years of working on grimy, rusty cars, it was such a treat for us to assemble so many shiny new parts — first, the rear suspension with its half-shafts and inboard disc brakes, and later the dash, gauges and wiring. And doing it together was even more fun than we had thought.
With Fleetwood Mac or Green Day blasting, we’d chatter about car stuff, school or music while we worked, but at other times we’d proceed without speaking, anticipating each other’s moves and handing each other the right tools at the right time.
Although it wasn’t part of our original deal, I bought a rebuilt 351-cubic-inch Ford V-8 for Tim’s birthday in July. We had opted to supply our own engine and transmission, and to save money, we tried to scrimp on the gearbox. After wasting weeks on a junkyard transmission that didn’t fit in the car, we finally bought a slick Tremec five-speed, and it slipped right in.
Most installations require muscling a transmission up under the car with the help of a hydraulic jack or two. We simply plopped this one onto the floor where the driver’s seat would eventually go, unscrewed a side panel on the tunnel, slid the gearbox over onto the frame and against the engine.
Mr. Shelby designed the 427 Cobra with the engine slightly behind the front wheels. For this reason, and the fact that the car is relatively short, the driveshaft is only 14 inches long, instead of the usual 4 to 6 feet. We just sat in the seats and bolted it in, refitting the top tunnel panel when we were all done. Tim said he eventually wanted to make a Plexiglas panel so he can watch the driveshaft spin.
Among other things, he installed the entire wiring harness himself and was pleased when all the lights and gauges worked. The day before he returned to college, he cranked the starter. The car backfired through the air cleaner as it tried to catch, and the tension grew as we moved spark plug wires around in the distributor and tried again and again. When the engine finally rumbled to life, it was the perfect ending to our summer.
To my delight, Tim had elected not to use the signature Cobra side pipes, but a less-showy under-car dual exhaust system used on some of the original cars. It’s quieter than side pipes, but the V-8 burble is still sweet.
When the first-drive day finally arrived, I don’t know who was more excited. Tim climbed in, latched his four-point belt, set the choke, turned the key and the engine came to life. Standing beside the car, I had a lump in my throat as he backed it smoothly out of the garage. Tim, who had needed a special incentive to find his way, now knew exactly where he was going.
Piloting our Cobra has been a pleasant surprise. Although popular myth says Cobras are a handful to drive, an advantage of good replicas is that their frames are generally more rigid, so handling is better and there’s noticeably less vibration. It’s quick, as any 2,200-pound car with more than 300 horsepower will be, but predictably easy to control. Handling and steering are excellent, there’s little wind noise and the well-placed controls feel smooth and light.
Several car-enthusiast friends reacted early on by saying, “You’re giving a 427 Cobra to a teenage kid? You’re crazy! At least take him to a good safe-driving school before you turn him loose.”
They were right, of course, and Tim, who always wanted to go to such a school, agreed. We plan to attend a safe-driving school (not a racing school) together this summer. He’ll be 20, and I’ll be the one with the enormous grin on my face.