Cobra

So, does it have heritage, style, performance, and total emissions-free capability? Of course, it does – it’s the latest model in the rebirth of AC Cars. The AC Cobra Series 4–electric or: ‘The AC Superblower updated for the new world’. […]

The First Three Shelby Cobras – The Sports Cars that Changed the Game is the fourth in the Exceptional Cars series from Porter Press. Produced with the same handsome attention to details as their other books, this volume details the story of three cars important to modern sports car history and Cobras in particular –  the first AC Cobras created by the legendary Carroll Shelby in 1962. The prototype Cobra, CSX2000, has been described as ‘the most important modern American car’, although it was built on a British AC Ace chassis with an American Ford V8 engine. CSX2001 was the first production Cobra and CSX2002 the first to race, leading to a series of competition successes that made Shelby’s Cobras famous and a favorite of sports-car enthusiasts throughout the world.

MacG Racing, the UK’s only distributor of the current AC Cobra brand, will be launching the first right-hand-drive MK VI at The Performance Car Show this month. Handbuilt in Germany, this is the first chance for petrolheads to see this version of the exquisite and powerful AC Cobra. AC Cars is one of the UK’s oldest car manufacturers and was first established in 1901 when John Weller set up a garage in London to realise a passion for building cars. It was in 1903 that Weller, with the backing of wealthy businessman John Portwine, helped bring the concept to reality as Weller debuted two versions of his ‘Autocar’ at the British Motor Show that year – in a twin-cylinder 10-horsepower and a four-cylinder 20-horsepower configuration. For the first time in 1915, the abbreviation AC was used, and in November of […]

Carroll Shelby‘s son Patrick and grandson Aaron made the winning $539,000 bid at Barrett-Jackson’s Scottsdale auction in January to return Carroll’s first race car to the family home in Dallas, making the diminutive but singular 1949 MG TC the world’s most expensive MG for a long time to come. Per the description on the Barrett-Jackson website: The first car that Carroll Shelby drove in a road race. The car that started his racing career. In May of 1952, his good friend Ed Wilkins let Carroll Shelby drive this MG TC in a road race at Norman, Oklahoma. It was Shelby’s first sport car race. He won it, and the second race, too, easily outrunning the Jaguar XK120’s. That race and this car changed the course of his life as he went on to achieve immortality as creator of the Shelby […]

Legendary British sports car maker AC Cars is returning home to Britain to build its cars at Brooklands in Surrey. The company that built the iconic AC Cobra had been based in Malta but a legal dispute over the factory has prompted the return to Britain. Owner of the AC brand, Acedes Holdings LLC, struck the new deal with AC specialist Brooklands Motor Company, which has been based in Jack Brabham’s former workshops in Weybridge, Surrey, for the past two decades. The company will make the original AC Ace, the AC MK11, the AC MK11 FIA and the AC MK111 at the Brooklands facility. A new factory in Michigan is also planned where AC will build cars for the US market. It is expected that about ten cars a year costing £150,000 will come out of the Brooklands workshop and […]