One-off 2013 Shelby GT500 Cobra debuts as Tribute to Carrol

The Monterey Peninsula is celebrating all things Shelby this week as part of the company's 50th anniversary celebration. The Cobra in particular will be a part of many events including the Pebble Beach Concours and the Monterey Motorsports Reunion happening at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca.

The Shelby celebration is also especially meaningful since founder Carroll Shelby passed away back in May. As a tribute to the legendary racer and car builder, Shelby American, Ford Motor Company and Ford Racing have teamed up to build a very special tribute Mustang. Called the 2013 Shelby GT500 Cobra, the car features a custom widened body that fits massive 13-inch-wide wheels fitted with a set of 345-series tires. All of that extra traction is quite necessary, as a 4.0-liter Whipple supercharger has been fitted atop the 5.8-liter V8 to produce 850 horsepower. The look of the car is completed with traditional Shelby livery: Guardsman Blue with Wimbledon White stripes.

The 2013 Shelby GT500 Cobra is currently on display at the Monterey Motorsports Reunion this weekend, and Shelby says that they plan to tour the car around the country for the next several months before it will be auctioned off for charity.

But Shelby didn't design it, a guy named John Tojeiro did, for the English company AC Cars. What Shelby did was to replace the crappy English motor with a Ford V8.

That was Shelby's niche - he took the American hot-rodding, engine-swapping approach to performance, inspired by the similar Cadillac-Allard that he drove in races a decade before he first dropped a Ford V8 into an AC Ace chassis.

Of course, the AC design changed at Shelby's direction. The 289 Coupe was prototyped in the U.S. and shipped to England to be copied, IIRC. Once they'd wrung all they could out of that 289, Shelby's team started playing with the 427 NASCAR engine. To accommodate the larger engine, new suspension and larger wheels, most of the body was changed while retaining the original AC appearance. The most obvious of the changes are the more pronounced fender flares and the larger grille opening. There wasn't much left of the car that AC initially designed underneath.

Interestingly, the 427 Cobra and GT40 were among the first vehicles to benefit from computer-assisted design, thanks to Ford's suspension guru, Klaus Arning, collaborating with a FORTRAN programmer named Chuck Carrig. Henry Ford, II deemed the experiment worthwhile regardless of cost - all part of the effort to stick it to Ferrari.

Arning wanted to put an independent rear suspension in the original Mustang, but the bean-counters nixed it. Those old accountants must get a chuckle out of seeing their successors continuing to use the same playbook.

So all Shelby did was take a British chassis with British coachwork design and drop in a big block V8?

Technically, the British chassis (with its traverse leaf springs) was found in the early small-block Cobras, but not the big-block cars. Those wore the AC coachwork (modified) but had Ford/Shelby designed frames and suspensions. There were still a lot of European-sourced parts on the 427 cars, though: Girling brakes, Koni shocks, etc.

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