[Steve Cassani]

In Cobra, The First 40 Years, Trevor Legate recounts Ken Miles efforts to modify a Daytona coupe to make the car competitive for overall wins. Miles had won the 1965 Daytona 24 Hour race in a GT40 and Sebring was only a month away. As Legate tells it (page 151):

The bumpy airfield circuit at Sebring was next on the agenda and with a major victory under his belt, Ken Miles could almost choose any car he wanted. Concerned that the circuit could create reliability problems, Ken quietly made a few adaptations to a Daytona coupe which he believed would put it on a par with the GT40. Before he could test his theory, Phil Remington got wind of his project and, backed by Carroll Shelby, put a stop to it. He was determined the coupes would race only for class victories and not chase outright wins against the Ford cars. As a result, Miles was left with little option but to partner Bruce McLaren in a GT40…

The ‘few adaptations’ Miles made are likely not known in any detail. We can conclude that the coupe might have been made to compete with the GT40 at Sebring, a course not as well suited to the Ford car as Daytona. While Miles saw a better chance of his winning two major races in a row in a modified coupe, the prospect of a Shelby-prepared car taking a win from Ford in the US was obviously inconsistent with Shelby’s prior commitment to make the GT40 a winner. From what I’ve read of Ken Miles this is the sort of problem he prided himself in ignoring so I am not surprised to learn that he would act unilaterally in a way that undermined a strategy that kept Ford dollars flowing to Shelby American. Clearly, neither Phil Remington nor Carroll Shelby saw any reason to indulge him.