The Shelby American (Summer 2022)

Pete Disher has been the energizer behind the Coralsnake website for more than twenty years. That’s saying something, because his independent website is free – and free of advertis- ing. It is all about 1968 Shelbys and Special Shelby Paint, but it also touches on Conelec Fuel Injection, ‘68 Shelby dealers, 1968 production de- tails, historical archives of SAAC Gold Concours Award winners since 1997 and a lot more. It’s a labor of love of just one man who, over the past twenty years, has demonstrated dedi- cation to these cars as well as sharing the specialized knowledge he has gained over the years. The Coralsnake.com is an inde- pendent website dedicated to provid- ing accurate information about vintage Shelbys and Shelby Engineer- ing cars. The Coralsnake’s information is all original content; it is not copied from other sources – and that’s saying something in the Internet age where so many details are available from so many different sources, and rarely with attribution. Further, everything on this website is reviewed by the most knowledgeable Shelby re- searchers, concours judges and own- ers. Nothing is here by happenstance. When Disher began his website, a lot of information had been developed about 1965-1966 and 1967 Shelby pro- duction details, but not so much about 1968s and 1969-70 cars. At it’s start, he called his website “1968cobra.com” but when Ford and Shelby began chas- ing people down who were using their trademarks without permission, rather than get bogged down with legal niceties, he simply changed the name to “the-coralsnake.com ”. That name was based on Disher’s special paint 1968 GT500KR. The Coralsnake was based on a previous owner’s name for the car which was one of three originally assembled with special orange paint. This color had a factory paint code (WT 5185) but no specific name. In this case it was the same as the 1969 colors “Calyspo Coral” and “Competition Orange.” Pro- duction colors were often previewed on small numbers of cars built the year before as “special orders” to test public reaction to these colors before deciding to make them standard. Prior to Disher’s detective work and compiling information on the Special Paint Shelbys, there was very little known about them. Through his deter- mination and persistence he created a skeleton outline and then proceeded to hang meat on it. Before anyone real- ized it he knew how many Special Paint cars were produced during the 1968 model run – 159 of them. And he knew the number of different colors – only 6. And he knew the color codes. The SHELBY AMERICAN Summer 2022 75 – Rick Kopec saac@saac.com