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The SHELBY AMERICAN

Fall 2016 2

THE “OTHER” CSX2000 SURFACES

YOU’RE NOT HALLUCINATING: IT is A GIANT COBRA

IT’S ALL ABOUT ME – SCREW EVERYONE ELSE

The first Cobra, CSX2000, never out of

Carroll Shelby’s hands, sold at Mon-

terey in August for $12,500,000. How

would you like to have paid that much

only to see another CSX2000 turn up.

Does anyone dare tell the new owner

that there is a second vehicle out there

carrying the same number? It’s a

pretty safe bet that the two vehicles

will never turn up at the same place

at the same time... unless the Cobra

stalls on a railroad crossing.

All it takes is one unthinking jackass to spoil a car show, and that’s what we

have here, folks. Someone arrives early at the convention with their car on a

trailer and unloads it. Instead of parking the trailer with all the rest of the

trailers in another lot, he unhitches it, locks the tongue and leaves it in the

middle of the spot where the popular vote show cars will be parked the follow-

ing day. Then he promptly disappears, oblivious to the problem he has caused.

After the show, he loads up and heads home. He was lucky because a couple of

self-styled “vigilantes” were discussing putting a knife into the sidewalls of all

four tires and filling the receiver lock with Krazy Glue, but they were talked

out of it. If anyone can supply the name of the moron who owns this trailer we

will be happy to print it in an upcoming issue and attempt to cause him as

much public humiliation as we can. Think of it as karma.

Back in the 1980s this giant fiberglass

coiled cobra was a sign that, as a

Shelby memorabilia collector, you had

gone off the deep end. A fiberglass ar-

tisan in the midwest created these

statues and found a few buyers. They

were painted any colors you wanted

(usually to match your car) and if

memory serves, they were about $300 a crack – a ton of money for a large trin-

ket back then. If you absolutely must have one today, expect to pay about

$1000. Still have the urge? Contact Jim Cowles: jim@shelbyparts.com

lars or more, thirty-five years

down the road.

When someone with a Cobra

was confronted by a serious buyer

who offered seven to ten times

what he had paid for the car a

mere ten or fifteen years ago, he

had to think long and hard about

it. In most cases, the car had not

been purchased as an investment

but as just an enjoyable “hobby”

car. But with it now being worth

upwards of $100K-$150K, that’s

exactly what it had become. That

kind of windfall represented the

cost of a house (or paying off a

mortgage). Or the seed money to

start that business you always

thought about. Or the purchase of

commercial property. Or the kids’

college fund. Unless you hit the

lottery or received a sizable unex-

pected inheritance, that kind of

life-changing money just didn’t

come your way.

Of course, there were a hand-

ful of Cobra purists who looked at

the owners who succumbed to the

lure of the big bucks as “sell-outs”

who were not true Cobra enthusi-

asts to begin with. Who knows

what gave them the right to be so

judgemental about other people’s

lives? The point is that when the

prices reached a certain level,

there was a “sell-off” of Cobras and

we detect a similarity, today, with

1965 GT350s.

Owners who have had their

cars the longest, and who paid the

least for them, will have the most

difficult time resisting the siren

song. If they look to history and

see that if those selling their Co-

bras for $150K in the late 1980s or

early 1990s had waited until today,

they might have had a $1M pay-

day. But who can be sure that if a

1965 GT350 owner waits until

2030, his car will follow the same

trajectory as the Cobra and be

worth $1M? Stranger things have,

of course, happened. But we look to

Harry Callahan for advice at times

like this. “

You have to ask yourself,

‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do you,

punk?