One of the more perplexing muscle cars of the sizzling Sixties was the 1969 Cobra. Or was that the Fairlane Cobra? Or, more to the point, was this mid-sized Ford a Fairlane 500 Cobra? Some people mistakenly apply the term Torino Cobra.
The original Cobra was Carroll Shelby’ s two-seat, aluminum-bodied roadster, first with a small block V-8( 260 and a 289), followed by perhaps the most awesome muscle car of all time, the infamous 427 Cobra. The small block Cobra decimated the Corvette in domes- tic road racing and beat Ferrari internationally to win the world championship of makes for GT cars. The big block could go from 0 to 60 mph in less than four seconds and proved invincible in its SCCA road racing class.
At the end of the 1967 model year, when Carroll’ s company, Shelby-American, quit making their 2200-pound sports car, Ford attached the nameplate to the 1968 Shelby Mustang. The new GT350s and GT500s were the new Cobras. There was no profit to letting such a storied nameplate go to waste. No other badge had quite so much charisma in the United States as the Cobra.
Where else could Ford make use of the Cobra badge?
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