The Shelby American (Fall 2021)

to sell the red Cobra – that day – and the deal was done for $350,000, sight unseen. There was no need for a third loan from his father this time. Arrangements were made for ship- ment from California to Washington state, where Earl flew in, immediately took the keys and drove home to British Columbia, Canada. Over the next two years he replaced all non- original parts with original ones, while not touching the paint – rock chips and all. “I loved the red patina. It can only be original once,” recalls Pfeifer. Earl drove CSX3282 to SAAC-32, at Miller Motorsport Park in Utah, in 2007 from his home in Canada. He was presented with an award for the Best Cobra by Peter Brock. “ Before the award was handed out, Peter ap- proached me, asking quite a few ques- tions about the car. I guess he liked what he’d heard .” “I remember the first time Lewis Hamilton, the British Formula 1 rac- ing driver, called our house wanting to buy CSX3282. Carol and I had gotten back together by now and I wasn't home. Carol answered the phone. She said she could barely understand his British accent and what he said, but the gist was that he wanted to buy a 427 Cobra, paint it black and put all the S/C equipment on it. Carol told him we would never sell our car on that basis and hung up the phone on him. “Later, we heard he now wanted to buy our Cobra and keep it all stock, and purchase another Cobra to be painted black. Hamilton got in touch with the owner of 3244 and bought that car, and shortly thereafter ac- quired mine. He could easily afford both, and a paint job. There are pic- tures of him in the black Cobra on the net, but no photos or mention of my car. “Driving a 427 Cobra was a perish- able skill. Every spring when I got the car on the road for the first time I had to re-learn how to drive it. And that would take a week or two. Cobras are very easy to drive as well as being fun, unless you floor it. Then, all of a sud- den it’s Jekyll and Hyde. Jekyll shakes your hand and Hyde bites it off. When someone asked me why it was so hard to pilot a 427 Cobra, I had them imag- ine driving this nice car and stomping on the gas. Almost immediately, the entire car leaps up and flies three feet to the right. And if you aren’t prepared for this to take place, you’ll be leaving the road, backwards, at a very high rate of speed.” “And that was with modern tires. I spent more than two years trying to locate five 8.15x15 Blue Dot tires and each one cost me thousands of dollars. At one point my brother and I in- stalled them on #3282 and went for a drive. We started laughing so hard we had to pull off the road. As soon as you touched the gas the tires would spin. After a while my brother began re- peating, ‘That's a hundred bucks’, ‘That's another hundred bucks.’ I be- lieve I’m one of the few people who still owns an original AL-24C battery which came new in the Cobras. Back when I had my car, very few people even knew what battery they came with. “My father was the New Car Sales Manager at Metro Ford in Calgary, Canada, and was the only man in Canada to sell a new 427 Cobra, CSX3257. I was sitting on the deck with my dad, many years ago, having a beer and enjoying the summer sun when out of the blue he said, ‘You know, I nearly crashed that damn car.’ He was the only person authorized to drive the Cobra for sale at the dealer- ship, and one day he took it for a spin in downtown Calgary. He stopped at an intersection and turned left but gave it too much gas. Suddenly he was doing 360° loops in the middle of a busy Calgary thoroughfare. All traffic had stopped and Dad said he was hanging onto the wheel with all his might. The car finally quit spinning and the engine died. He just sat there shaking. And, wouldn’t you know it, he was sitting right in front of the General Motors dealer and he knew the New Car Sales Manager – who had just witnessed his spinout. The GM guy ran out to Dad and said, ‘Wow, Bill, you're as white as a ghost.’ They started the car and pulled it off the road and eventually Dad calmed down. Later, he drove back to Metro Ford very carefully and said he never drove it again. I asked him why he had never told me this story and he replied, ‘I was too embarrassed.’ “A friend and I spent ten years searching for ‘Dad’s 427 Cobra.’ The car had disappeared after Metro Ford had sold it. The paperwork was long gone, and this was before SAAC un- The SHELBY AMERICAN Fall 2021 103 Lewis Hamilton in CSX3282. CSX3282