Cobra Oddballs: The Willment Coupe

Cobra Oddballs: The Willment Coupe

By Wallace Wyss

   There is an old axiom in racing: “Never, repeat never, sell rival teams the same model you are racing.”

     Shelby stuck to that around 1965 when a British team, owned by a Ford dealer, asked to buy a Daytona coupe.  Shelby hemmed and hawed and pretty much avoided it but said “Hey, I’ll send you the plans.”  Which he did, and with a Shelby crewman, John Ohlson, working on the car, the same man who had worked on the originals, it looked more or less like  a Daytona coupe, except it didn’t have a fastback window.

      The chassis is said to be the same Cobra roadster that  that finished at Le Mans, s/n CS2131, which was sold to privateer John Willment. The car was a wreck when it was returned to A.C. cars so rather than put a roadster body on it, they chose to build a coupe. When Shelby said “no” to one of the six he had ordered, they said “hell with it, let’s do it ourselves.”
Compared to the 'original', the 'Willment' coupe has a sharper nose and some cutlines the originals don’t and a higher tail.

     By the way there is no small amount of confusion that Willment also took owned a roadster with the same serial number but one of the cars did not have an "X" in the number since it was never exported to the U.S. The Willment (CSX2131) coupe was built on a spare un-numbered chassis, so Willment also called it 2131 which offered certain tax and import advantages when shipping the car to overseas races since it was already registered. It was registered 39PE but in South Africa was registered 39PH. Cobra expert Trevor Legate points out the low roofline was more in keeping with Peter Brock's orginal idea.

     Painted in the familiar red and white Willment colours, the Coupe was completed in the fall of 1964 and had the pleasure of delivering a debut victory when piloted by Jack Sears in a 3 Hour race at Snetterton against strong competition including a lightweight E-Type and the Cobra’s mortal enemy, the Ferrari 250 GTO. Before the end of the season the car was raced twice in South Africa, clinching one class win. Willment campaigned his unique Coupe throughout Europe in 1965 with mixed results—not enjoying the benefit of Shelby sponsorship (actually Shelby’s Daytona coupes were farmed out to an English team that season) . Sears finished second in the Sussex Trophy at the start of the season and scored the car's only win in the Guards International Trophy in the fall of 1965.


     The car had a checkered career after that, being sold to a Liverpudilian police officer, who raced the car at club events and then reaching an owner with moneyt o do it up nice, one  the Rothschild banking heirs. Early in the 1980s the car was sold to an American collector and has been on display recently at  the Shelby American Collection. During the 2007 Goodwood Revival where it was driven by Desire Wilson and Lyn St. James.

Historic Cobra Series - The "Flip Top" CSX2196

Illustration: This version with the three Ferrari GTO type air intakes was the way it looked when
Miles crashed it into the only tree on the course at Sebring."

One of the most famous Cobras ever built had a really odd career. That’s because it was a “mule” car that was used for development. It has the nickname “flip top” which was given to it because the front hood rose along with the fenders for engine access like the flip top of a cigarette box.

In its first incarnation, in 1963, Shelby asked Ken Miles,m his famous development driver, to see if he could put a 427 in it. Now this was a leaf spring car so it didn’t take to kindly to all the additional power and weight.

Miles must have had a sense of humor as he put three air intake slots above the big Cobra grille cavity the slots copies of those on the Ferrari 250GTO0—the arch enemy of the Cobra.

The car handled squirrely and Miles managed to crash it in practice at Sebring by hitting the only tree on the course!  He then stayed up all night trying to rebuild it for the race. It is reported Miles had two broken or cracked ribs. The next day he started the race, then turned it over to John Morton, who subsequently blew the engine .

The specially built Cobra was the only version with solid front and rear bodywork that could be flipped up for full access to the working parts. (Photo: RM Auctions)

The car was taken back to California and a lighter body developed that was flip top in the front (a la E-type Jaguar) and flip top in the back (a la GT40) , called “clam-shell” style and common on some pure racing cars of the time.

It was fitted with an all aluminum 390 inch Ford for testing but when it went to Nassau some say it was running an iron block 427 again . At Nassau it was hotter than a two dollar pistol at first but it was whomped by the Corvettes in what was a “rigged” race in a way as GM was there backing the Grand Sport Corvettes (tube frame Corvettes) though GM was officially out of racing. Zora Arkus-Duntov, chief Corvette man, had been slapped by GM brass for secretly developing the Grand Sports and told to disband his racing program but since Nassau was not in the U.S. he made one last stab at racng them to humble the Cobras and succeeded at that one event.

The flip top went through several owners and was again fitted with a 427. It was last seen in the RM auction in 2010 where it did not meet the reserve. This writer would like to see it in its regular Cobra body with the 250GTO air intakes—maybe then it could be the most expensive racing Cobra to hit an auction, other than the Cobra Daytona coupes…

 ~Wallace Wyss

image credit: RM Auction Co.

THE STORY OF A BOOK COVER by Eric Musarra

THE STORY OF A BOOK COVER by Eric Musarra

      When he wrote SHELBY The Man The Cars The Legend author Wallace Wyss says he was inspired by the book by Brock Yates called

"Against Death and Time: One fatal season in Racing's Glory Years."

    "The cover fascinated me--it was an old picture in sepia tones of approximately eight or so Indy racers and I wondered as soon as I looked at it 'who are those guys and what happened to them?' "

    By chance, at a swap meet a few week later in Long Beach, Wyss bought a similar picture, of five race drivers in driving suits, but in the center of the picture was Carroll Shelby. "The sad thing is that of the four racers pictured beside team manager Carroll Shelby, three met their demise behind the wheel of  a race car," says Wyss. The picture was an old publicity picture from the 1965 Sebring 12 hour, a race in which the GT40s being run by the Shelby team were vanquished by a Chaparral driven by an old student of Shelby, Jim Hall, also a native of Texas.

   The Yates' book cover also had a colorful race car in the picture, and Wyss was able to sneak a color picture of a Cobra onto the cover though it's jammed into the upper right, not down where the racers are as in the Yates' book.

    "I also got the idea of a subtitle from a name of an exhibition at the Petersen Museum," says Wyss. "They called their

Shelby exhibit "A Life in the Fast Lane."

   So his lengthy original title as submitted back in 2007 was:

   SHELBY

   A Life in the Fast Lane

   The Creator of the Cobra and his lifelong search for the soul of the American Musclecar."

   The last part of the subtitle Wyss says was inspired by another Brock Yates' book Outlaw Machine: Harley-Davidson and the Search for the American Soul."  I managed to work in the word 'soul' , says Wyss, but in the end my publisher shortened the whole thing

to "The Man, The Cars, the Legend."

    Wyss says that the writing style of SHELBY The Man The Cars The Legend was greatly influenced by the Harley book of Yates "because he didn't waste time talking about head design and so forth but explored more the International appeal of the Harley and why Harleys continue to fascintae people even though technically, they are in the dark ages compared to some foreign bikes, much as Cobras are primitive compared to Ferraris but that didn't stop them from beating Ferraris in racing."

    Yates, says Wyss, "is a rare combination of historian and literary writer. He has written about racing in a way that transcends the nuts and bolts and in my book I tried to do the same thing, as now that there is the internet anyone can find out how big the

'65 Shelby GT350 carburetor was. I thought 'it's more important to find out why Ford underwrote Shelby' and the like....