THE COBRA TO END ALL COBRAS

F1 history to land across the ditch

The 1966 Shelby Cobra 427 Super Snake Is Nothing Short Of Ridiculous

Who reading this can say they’ve never sat there daydreaming about building the ultimate version of whatever car they’re into? The fastest, the scariest, and the most over-the-top, butt-puckering machine that may or may not kill its driver without a moment’s notice.

Carroll Shelby no doubt spent time mulling over those exact same big dreams. The difference is, he had the technical ability, the connections, the team, the finances, and the timing to make those dreams a reality at a time when much of what he wanted to do had never been done before.

Shelby is, of course, well known for these big swings when it comes to insanely high-performance vehicles but if there’s one example that trumps even the GT350, GT40, and Daytona Coupe for outright insanity, it’s got to be the 1966 Shelby Cobra 427 Super Snake.

Carroll Shelby only built two of these incredible twin-supercharged 427 big block-powered machines — one for himself (#CSX3015) and one for his good friend Bill Cosby (#CSX3303). Long before date rape drugs and prison time, Cosby drove that car exactly one time before never touching it again and eventually returning it out of fear for his life. Unfortunately, only Shelby’s #3015 still exists today after Cosby’s #CSX3303 was then on-sold to an enthusiast named Tony Maxey, who launched it off a cliff and into the Pacific Ocean, killing himself and the car in the process.

As an interesting aside, what was left of that car was actually recovered and taken to a scrap yard, where it was eventually located and purchased by a collector, who then shipped it over to AC cars in the UK to be rebuilt, albeit with an all-new frame and body panels, and no superchargers, making it no longer a Super Snake.

So let’s dig into the story of the Super Snake to see exactly what makes it so special, and just why Cosby refused to drive it after its maiden voyage.

As any Ford enthusiast is probably already aware, there were quite a few different versions of the Shelby Cobra produced between 1962 and 1967, but the most hardcore of them all was the 427 Competition Roadster (23 built) and 427 SemiCompetition (28 built) models — the latter being slightly paired down street-legal versions of the full Competition race cars, though many were put into motorsport duties regardless.

In early 1966 Shelby decided that he was going to get a little silly and build his own street-legal Cobra. The existing 420+hp S/C model, while an incredibly fast machine in its own right, just wasn’t going to be enough — he wanted more … Much more.

This led to the creation of the Super Snake, which started life as a full-blown Cobra Competition model, the lightest and most powerful available.

Shelby kept these unique Competition-only body panels, along with the bigger brakes, diff, and headers, then added a full exhaust system, windshield, and bumpers that would allow the car to be registered for the road. A bigger, heavily-bulged aluminium bonnet was also made and fitted to accommodate the Super Snake’s most eye-popping attribute — its absolutely insane (especially for the time) powerplant.

The original competition-spec 427ci FE side- to the crank first, before the valvetrain. Pulling air and fuel through a single four-barrel 780 CFM Holley carburettor, these motors made a very respectable grunt well north of 400hp. This was arguably already a little too much power for the Cobra chassis to deal with but Shelby didn’t care. He wanted his Super Snake to be stupidly — perhaps even irresponsibly — overpowered, with double that grunt.

This roughly 800hp was achieved through the use put into semi-daily driver duties as Shelby’s personal vehicle. This was easily one of the fastest street cars on the planet at the time, capable of a three-second 0-100kph sprint at a time when cause all sorts of mischief behind the wheel of the Super Snake, competing in local road races, obliterating buzzards at ultra-high speed on the highway, and once even being snapped by the cops for travelling at 195mph through the Nevada desert.

It all came to an end in 1970, when Shelby popped the 427ci during a Nevada road race. He decided he’d had enough, and quickly rebuilt the motor and sold it to Canadian musician Jimmy Webb. Unfortunately for Webb, while he did write some great songs, he wasn’t so hot at paying his US taxes and soon ran afoul of the IRS, forcing him to skip back across the border into Canada, but it, and then putting it up for auction, where it sold for US$375,000 in 1995. investigators finally located the Super Snake, seizing

Since then, unlike Cosby’s #CSX3303 Super Snake, Shelby’s #CSX3005 has remained relatively unmolested aside from a return to the original Metallic Blue from the Guardsman Blue it had been changed to at some point in the ’70s. The car has also changed hands between various enthusiasts multiple times since its rediscovery and last sold in 2022 for a cool US$5.5 million.

As Road and Track magazine so artfully put it back in 1968, Shelby’s big dream turned reality was the “Cobra to end all Cobras”. With only one example remaining, though, the chances of any of us actually seeing a real Super Snake — let alone driving one — are next to none. With that kind of power, such a low kerb weight, and sketchy sixties tyre technology to contend with, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

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