Shelby little involvement in creating the Cobra

[HealeyRick]

Originally Posted by Trevor Legate

It could have also been applied to the Austin Healey 3000 had Donald Healey liked the idea, or a Jensen or an Aston Martin. It just happened to be an AC. Fortunately.....

The Healey involvement with Shelby's plan is pretty well known. Shelby came to Donald Healey with a proposal to put Chevrolet motors into the Healey 3000. Shelby had been a Healey factory driver and they were well known to each other. Donald was no stranger to V8 power and swapped a Chevy V8 into his personal Jensen 541 and favored Shelbys proposal and was willing to provide Shelby with a Healey chassis. It was Austin, not Donald Healey that nixed the idea. Word is too, that Chevrolet had no interest in providing motors to power a car that would be a likely Corvette killer.

Originally Posted by Brooklyn-427

Healey`s fait had been sealed with the tie in with Austin, unfortunately as history speaks before us Bristish Leyland killed them off otherwise a Rover V8 engined 3000 would of been the future for that car.

Most of the reason Healey died was the implementation of the US safety and emission standards. According to Donald Healey in his autobiography, there was no way the 3000 could meet the side impact standards nor could a catalytic converter be added under the terribly low-slung Healey chassis. Nevertheless, if Healey continued, they would have used the 3 liter 6 cylinder Austin Princess motor built by Rolls Royce. Three of these prototypes were built and are known as Rolls-Healeys or Healey 4000s. Austin had developed a twin cam head for the motor, which Healey really wanted to get their hands on. But it was Lord Stokes, head of Leyland, that was hot to rid himself of Healey and MG in favor of Triumph, which he used to head. MG continued on and came out with the MGC as a replacement for the Healey, although the 6 cylinder C motor was not based on the Healey motor as some think. It's interesting to note that despite the availability of the Buick-Olds-Rover motor, it took the independent work of Ken Costello putting them into MGBs to drag MG into eventually offering their own factory version in 1973.