289-powered Shelby Cobra

Even by Shelby Cobra standards, this one is a bit special

Melbourne-based collector and sometimes racer Joe Calleja has shared some fascinating cars with us over the years and is remarkably relaxed about his Shelby Cobras.

And yes, they’re real ones. However he is pretty excited about his latest acquisition, and takes up the story: “We had three Cobras when I bought this. The big block was sold to a fella in Brisbane – he did some work on it and ended up winning a concours with it. When we sold up we wanted to buy a Cobra we could race overseas and in a way it was a mistake!

“When I bought this, I discovered there were only three of them, it was the prototype and had been with one owner for 50 years. So it was too good to set up for racing.

“It’s a ’65 that went to Hayward Motors and then another fellow Ron Tredway, who’s well-known in the Cobra fraternity, had it from 1969 through 2020 when I bought it! He raced it a little and I remember seeing it at Monterey in 2012 at Laguna Seca, in the year of the Cobra.”

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As Joe suggests, this is a very special car, even by Cobra standards. Listed in the international register as the first of three “Slalom Specials” it was eventually sold as a factory demonstrator for US$5805.37.

It left the factory running a 289 V8 with dual quad carburettors and T10 four-speed transmission. With Tredway at the wheel in the early 1970s, and running a set of Weber carbs, it recorded an impressive 12.20sec standing quarter time at 116mph (203km/h). For the time, that was a very serious set of numbers for a road-legal car.

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Imagine then just what an impact these cars had when launched a decade earlier. American writer John Christy shares a pretty funny insight into the start of the Shelby Cobra legend from his days at Peterson Publishing’s Sports Car Graphic magazine on the west coast of the USA.

Apparently the occasional business lunch in the very early 1960s with Shelby consisted of a steak sandwich accompanied by a string of martinis, followed by coffee. If Shelby was in an expansive mood, he’d talk about building the world’s quickest sports car and it was one such discussion where Christy helped make the link between small block Ford engines and the roadsters being built by the AC Car Company in the UK.

Move up some months to 1962 and Christy is invited by Shelby to see Cobra number 1 at Dean Moon’s speed shop. There he was confronted with what he described as looking like “an unpainted AC Bristol car with a longer nose.”

Much of the construction was familiar, with independent suspension at both ends and disc brakes all round. Christy also mentioned seeing a man wrestling in “the shortest drive shaft in captivity”.

“Not even Shelby knew what he had by the tail at that moment,” wrote Christy, “About all anyone could tell at that point was that, whatever it was, it was mean.”

And so it proved to be. The moment the car was assembled, Christy got his hands on it. “By any standards – today’s and the muscle car era of the late 1960s, or those of 1962 – the car was absolute dynamite. It didn’t have a name as yet but it had style… something that made heads turn.

“Aside from that, it would leave any car on the road standing in its own dents. It had a unique quality that I’ve seen in few other cars.

“It got underway in an absolutely blinding rush… you poked the pedal and dropped the hammer and the result was instant motion forward. The whole thing was a revelation…”

That was the beginning of an enterprise which produced just 60 cars in its first year, all powered by the 260ci version of the Ford small block. The 289s began partway through the following year’s production. Though they had their inevitable teething troubles and dramas, they quickly proved to be a formidable force in road racing, giving the likes of Chevrolet and even Ferrari a serious fright.

Joe has clearly been bitten hard by the Cobra bug and for him the connection goes back to childhood.

“When I was a kid there were two cars on my mind: AC Cobra was one I remember watching in that Ampol TV ad. It had a red Cobra going up a highway. That was one car I was possessed to get.

“The other was a Lamborghini Countach ‘periscope’. I bought that about six months ago and it’s in Melbourne now getting reworked. My mission is finished!” That said, he was also pretty excited by a Brough Superior motorcycle that was turning up the day we shot the Cobra.

Speaking of which, he’s ditched any plans to seriously race the car. “When we got it we bought a new motor for it, but it’s just too significant and too important to touch and turn into a race car. We are going to give it a little track time – John Bowe will debut it at the Rob Roy Hillclimb next March.

“What they (Shelby) used them for was for motorkhana-style events as a way to generate publicity. To have a Cobra that was someone’s possession for 50 years, and the first of three, well, we’re probably lucky it left America.

“What’s it like to drive? Really nice and quite easy. The 289s are always the easiest to drive and are a lovely engine with a good note.

“It is now exactly the way it was in the mid-1960s and it was the only one out of three that had a red interior. That’s how we plan to keep it. She’s a keeper.”