Quote:
Originally Posted by Historybuff
I think California fostered this mess by allowing sometime back any resident of their state to buy a kit Cobra and to call it a Cobra on the title and even to stamp on their own serial number. (which is why, if the DMV would sell you the list of Cobra owners, it would be several thousand cars longer than it should be if only confined to CSX2000 and CSX3000 cars).
Ironically by the way the Department of Motor Vehicles will still sell you an owner's name based on the license plate number you give them but now they write the owner first asking for permission--a law enacted after some stalker murdered a TV starlet whose address he bought from the DMV.
But where some previous postings in this subject area tell of a dealer taking a continuation car or reproduction and advertising it as an A.C. Cobra --that ought to be a crime. If these dealers (and auction companies ) are not stopped from doing so, I predict it could lead to some nasty repercussions at the big auctions, similar to when one auction company sold an Auto Union race car only to find out it was only assembled of parts--they then decided to get out of the car auction business altogether! I wish there was a registrar in the Cobra world as well versed as Marcel Massini in the Ferrari world who can be counted on to regularly poke holes when what he views as a "false" Ferrari is put on sale or display.
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Wally,
Sometime I feel compelled, like you, to post an item that goes off into as many tangents as possible. It is not just the auction companies. Once I saw an advertisement in a newspaper classified section for a used RX-7 that stated the car had a 4 cylinder engine. What was that used sale guy thinking? He probably lifted the hood and counted the spark plug wires. Wrong, the car doesn't have cylinders, it has two rotors with 2 plugs per rotor housing. A false advertisement! What a crime! A stalker of a starlet might accidentally purchase an RX-7 thinking it has a piston engine, not knowing what kind of potentially expensive money pit a rotary engined car might be. Where are the quality RX-7 registrars? And now I hear the Ferrari owners have a French mime as a registrar. I feel sorry for the Ferrari folks. But Wally, rest assured that SAAC knows a few things about whether Cobras are real or not. You should join SAAC, and get a Cobra registry. Don't worry about Carroll getting upset with you about joining SAAC (in case you missed it, Shelby and SAAC are on good terms these days). And poor Trevor, I don't suppose you ever got around to picking him up from his walkabout to Malta or feeding his dogs when you stopped by Brooklands to do those "AC" tooling spy paintings I suggested you do earlier. I hope that when you leave the state of California that you don't feel legally confined to only write about or paint pictures of cars in the CSX2000 and CSX3000 serial number ranges.