He hired designer Pete Brock to shape the car for maximum speed – something it would need on the legendary 3-mile Mulsanne straight at Le Mans, the most important race in the championship. Shelby modeled his dream machine on the basis of a previous racer he had developed, the AC Cobra Roadster.
Hulton Archive/Getty Imagesīut in 1963, years after Shelby had hung up his racing gloves, he wanted to win as a constructor – with an American car, at that. Shelby at Le Mans in an Aston Martin, 1959. He had already done so as a driver with Aston Martin, winning the prestigious FIA World Sportscar Championship in 1959, a series that the “prancing horse” was otherwise dominating. Today, 50 years after it was built, the Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe prototype finally sits in its rightful place – a museum founded by its current owner.Īs the name suggests, the car was created by American automotive entrepreneur, Carroll Shelby, who wanted to beat Italian designer Enzo Ferrari. Once retrieved from its dusty alcove, the car sparked a multimillion dollar legal battle for its ownership.
The extraordinary vehicle was the brainchild of an American car legend, who used it to win championships and shatter speed records. The original of only six ever built, it was the first American car to beat Ferrari on its own turf, was once engulfed by flames in Daytona, was driven around Los Angeles by a music celebrity, and then sat for 30 years in a storage unit – leading many to believe it had been lost. If this car could talk, it would describe a road to fame with all the twists and turns of a Hollywood plot.
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