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?
”