The venomous rise of the AC Cobra

It all started in 1953, when British racer John Tojeiro demonstrated his latest competition special to UK car maker AC, which really needed a new sports car to restore its mojo.

Renamed the AC Ace and displayed at the London motor show, it was received well enough that it was adapted for production, being given a new look and an AC straight six.

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It really hit the spot, as our 1958 verdict on the later Bristol-engined version shows: “The Ace offers a most rewarding combination of sheer speed and acceleration, with very safe handling, superb brakes and first-class steering, [and] it is a well-established sports car with a reputation for reliability.”

Three years later, a problem arose: Bristol retired its dated six, and its British Ford replacement disappointed. The solution was unexpected: Texan racer Carroll Shelby and a big Detroit Ford V8. Thus the Cobra was born.

“There is no denying that this car is extremely exciting to drive, or even passenger in,” we gushed in 1965.

“The acceleration is sensational, very similar to taking off in an open-cockpit aircraft. It is a fine-weather car for clear skies, open roads and life away from it all.

“Part of its sorcery lies in its ability to instil the same exhilaration from a short run on a Sunday morning, but most of it comes from that aggressive thrust of power that is always more than enough for any situation.”

It was enormously successful in motorsport, too, beating Ferrari to the 1965 FIA GT Championship title while wearing a sleek coupé body.

Cobra production ran until 1967, with 1002 being made, partially in the UK and partially in the US.

A whole generation had grown up lusting after this beautiful beast, though, so replicas became popular.

And in 1982, British Cobra specialist Autokraft sought to capitalise on this by getting permission from AC to restart production with the MkIV, and Brian Angliss’s team did such a fine job that in 1986, AC’s owners, exhausted by the bungled launch of the attractively modern but deeply flawed 3000ME coupé, were happy to sell up to him, and Ford lent him the right to use the Cobra name.

Things turned sour not long after, though, as Shelby restarted Cobra production himself over in the US – leading to a public war of words.

“All Cobras were made by AC in [the UK],” we reported Angliss saying in June 1993. “Every chassis was logged in AC’s factory records. [They] were painted and trimmed and dispatched to Shelby American minus the engine and gearbox.”

“AC was never anything but a sub-contractor to Shelby American,” countered Shelby. “Some were made in Italy and the US. We had a contract to buy so many chassis from AC, but a lot of the time those chassis would get damaged in shipping, and when they were, we would build the cars here.”

Angliss also claimed that AC had enacted “a massive programme to improve the 427 [the most iconic Cobra variant] and make it more sophisticated” – to Shelby’s ire.

“AC merely put the cars together and set up the chassis and body. We did all the development work in the States,” he said. “[Angliss] was not around for any of this. He knows nothing about it. That’s just about the time he was getting hair on his legs.”

He continued: “People want cars built by Carroll Shelby and they don’t give a hoot about anything produced by Brian Angliss as far as original Cobras are concerned.”

Meanwhile in the US, newspapers reported that Shelby was accused of claiming new Cobras were original ones – something he denied, saying Angliss was bad-mouthing him to hurt Shelby American’s business.

We reported in December 1993 that a settlement had been reached in Angliss’s favour – but that sure wasn’t the end of the argument.

“I proved in the courts two years ago that [my firm] manufactured the Cobra, not AC,” Shelby said after AC entered receivership in 1996.

Its saviour was Alan Lubinsky, and he managed to bury the hatchet in 2003, forming an alliance with Shelby to produce Cobra replicas.

But even now this car remains a magnet for litigation: only last year, the high court heard an argument between AC and Clive Sutton Ltd, the UK importer of Superformance replicas, over the Cobra trademark.