44-Year-old Cobra Wins Street Car Challenge

[Cobra #3170]

The car has a modified Appleton power steering gear with GM pump, ratio is 12-1 about .95 lock to lock. It is like a formula car for turn in but I run enough toe in that it is quite stable at high speeds. It actually feels like a modern car with a little quicker than normal steering. I have enough Ackerman % that I don't need any static toe out, thus it is stable in a straight line. We played around with boost so that there is still a good deal of "feel" but it is fairly easy to steer. I was well into 4th gear on the straight out of the Carousel at infineon (about 160 mph according to the PI system) and it was very stable even under some really heavy braking. My Wilwoods are about 10 years old now, I am sure their new stuff is much better. I just changed to a more aggressive pad last year which made the Wilwoods a ton better than they were originally. I did notice a lack of initial bite at Infineon which was spooky at high speed (probably a compound issue). I actually overshot the 180 because of that a couple of times, once with a passenger.
The passenger was Dave Wagner, I am sure some of you know him through his Cobra building business. He was a good sport about it, but I would not have liked being in that passenger seat not knowing if we would make the corner or not. I have to admit your 6 piston Wilwoods with slotted rotors look terrific and I am sure perform well too.

Originally Posted by D-CEL

Thank you so much for responding.

When I saw the drive pulley, integral with the crank spacer I assumed it was from Aviaid, sorry LOL.

Yea those old “open bridge” Superlites are… in a word… Crappy! While I was the Quality manager at Wilwood (several years ago) we received a lot of complaints, we built a test rig that measured pedal travel and input force, clamping force and caliper flex in several different axis. Eng attempted to fix it, but in the end, the whole caliper was redesigned into the current SL series that is very stiff. I run the SL-6R on the front of my SPF with a 12.75x1.25 rotor.

I’m certainly sorry to see you switching to Baer…

I would never be so presumptuous as to ask your wheel rates in open forum LOL.

From all the video I’ve watched, the car looks stiffer than the lunch room at Pfizer! And it steers like lightning. The turn in is amazing, almost too quick. I’m guessing it takes mighty powerful arms to turn a cobra like that