Car Guy Magazine Car Guy Magazine Issue 1214 | Page 19

Dave MacDonald could throw a car around any racetrack using a style that
looked more at home on a dirt oval than a paved road racing circuit. Always sideways, the soft-spoken MacDonald began his career on drag strips before switching to road racing in 1960. He immediately became the man to beat in the crude
solid-axle Corvettes of the era, frequently besting luminaries like Bob Bondurant
and Andy Porterfield. So when Carroll Shelby was making a short list of dream
drivers for his new Cobra squad in 1963, MacDonald was at the top.
MacDonald repaid this trust by winning his first race at Riverside, California, in 1963, giving Shelby his first Cobra victory. It was a big moment for the
young team, and things began moving fast. After Riverside, the Cobras buried
the Corvettes and Jaguars in Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) amateur racing, and both Shelby and MacDonald were aching to move up to the American
professional races, where the big money was.
Although the Cobra was a match for any GT-class sports car in the world,
it couldn’t hold a candle to the purpose-built mid-engined sports racers that
contended for overall victory in the newly formed United States Road Racing
Series (USRRC). The USRRC had a Manufacturers’ Championship for GT cars
like the original AC Cobra, plus a Drivers’ Championship for pilots of all-out
racing machinery. What Shelby needed was the next evolution of his original
formula for victory, namely a big Ford engine in a lightweight English chassis.
That step was the King Cobra.
THE ENGLISH CONNECTION

What Shelby craved was a reasonably priced mid-engined chassis he could buy
off the shelf, since he didn’t have the time or budget for an original design. Ford,
which had underwritten the Cobra program as an antidote to the Corvette, had
no particular interest in the USRRC as it prepared its secret weapon, the Ford
GT, for European endurance racing. So Shelby looked to the top companies
selling mid-engined racing cars in 1963—Lotus and Cooper—and picked the
sturdy Cooper Monaco over the fragile Lotus 19.
Cooper was one of the most successful English racing car manufacturers
of all time, having brought the mid-engined chassis layout to Formula 1, where
it carried off the 1959 and 1960 World Championships. The Monaco was a
two-seat sports-racing car introduced in 1958. By 1963, it had evolved into the
T61M model. The design was based on the 1962 Cooper Formula 1 car, with a
space frame, coil-over suspension all around, Dunlop four-wheel disc brakes, a
handsome aluminum body and a Coventry Climax FPF engine. The car proved
to be overbuilt and a little heavy for the Climax, which made it no competition
for the lighter Lotus 19 using the same power package. The future looked dim—
until the tall man from Texas sauntered into town.
The Shelby crew rounded up two new Monaco chassis (numbers CM/1/63
and CM/3/63), which Cooper beefed up and modified to accept Weber-carbu

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