The Shelby American (Summer 2022)

in this large sound stage and tested and then disassembled, packed into sometimes dozens of eighteen-wheel- ers and moved around the country or globally to the concert site. Everything gets set up for the show and then taken down, packed up and trans- ported to the next show. Some concert tours have dozens of stops across the country and last a couple of months or more. ] SERB: Every detail has to be worked out in advance, and then they re- hearse and rehearse and rehearse. Claire Brothers started about eight or nine years before I did. They were a little older. [ Note: Drew was able to arrange the visit during the GT350 tour because he sold part of his busi- ness to the Claire Brothers. ] SAAC: Did you ever do a Super Bowl Half-Time Show? SERB: Oh yeah, in fact, Claire did the last one. All those stadiums have ac- counts with us. We’ve got people there to make sure things happen. SAAC: You only get one shot at it. SERB: I know. You’ve got 200 or 300 million people watching so you hope it all works. It’s not like there’s nothing that could go wrong. It’s enormously complicated. SAAC: You started the Cobra restora- tion business before you started the museum, didn’t you? SERB: After I fixed that first Cobra I started collecting parts and I bought a couple of bodies from England and started preparing to do it myself. I en- joyed going out in the garage every night and working on this or that. That was my sanity, so evenings and weekends that’s where you’d find me. I wasn’t working for anybody but my- self, so if something took a little longer, who cared? I didn’t start working on other people’s cars until about twenty years ago. I had so many damaged cars that I took the time to build fix- tures and jigs for both cars – 427s and 289s. I had frame fixtures for all of the pieces and a body buck for both the 289 and the 427. We have narrow- hipped fenders, the FIA fenders and all that stuff. All the dashboard pat- terns and all the bucks are sitting there. One of the problems we found with most of the restoration shops is that everybody would eyeball stuff. You’d end up with one headlight a lit- tle higher than the other, the nose isn’t exactly in the center of the car, and there was no way to get it the same twice unless you take the time to make the tooling for it. Over the years I’d find a Cobra that wasn’t hit in the front (that’s hard to do) and I’d make a tool off of that. And then I’d find one that wasn’t hit in the back and I’d make a tool off of that. My youngest daughter, who was about fourteen at the time, helped me pour all that stuff – it was epoxy – pour it inside the body to make the dies. I built it be- cause I had two or three cars to re- store. And I bet it’s done forty or fifty now. SAAC: It all works out because we think the people who are really into the cars stay into them and they get in deeper over time. If you’re not really into them it’s a flight thing – you’re there for a little while, like a revolving door, and then you’re gone. SERB: In the last couple of decades the money people have gotten involved in it. They see the investment poten- tial. They’re not necessarily even car guys. That puts a whole different spin on it. SAAC: We can remember a time be- fore the first Cobra replica was made, when in order to restore a Cobra you had to start with something. Before Brian Angliss reproduced the first Cobra chassis, people were finding anything with a Cobra frame as their starting point: there were the five lengthened Paramount film chassis, Shelby American’s “show chassis” from 1964, or the eight “EFX” chassis built for Electric Fuel Propulsion in Ferndale, Michigan. Anything with a Cobra-like twin tube chassis became the basis for a Cobra reconstruction. That all stopped when Angliss began reproducing chassis and then Mark Gerish built an exact replica of a 427 Cobra S/C for Jay Leno in 1986. Then Mike McCluskey started building them and suddenly there was no mys- tique to the Cobra chassis any more. There was suddenly an alternative to searching for an already-existing Cobra chassis to use to build a car. SERB: It was all supply and demand. Back then there was no supply but a lot of demand. So the prices stayed more or less stable. Once there were more Cobra chassis being built the supply went up. But the demand for original Cobras never went down. Thank God there’s a registry. SAAC: When you began restoring Co- bras as a business, did you get more work than you could handle? SERB: I spent years trying to operate under the radar. I didn’t want to work on other people’s cars. But it’s kind of morphed into five guys working there now. The reason I did that is so I could get my cars worked on. But everything The SHELBY AMERICAN Summer 2022 41