1967 Shelby King Cobra Can-Am

If you were Carroll Shelby, 1966 was a pretty good year. Coming off his Cobras winning the 1965 FIA GT championship, Shelby took over command of Ford’s struggling GT40 program and in 1966 finally handed Henry Ford II the 24 Hours of Le Mans victory he and the Blue Oval so badly desired. Back at home, not only was Shelby American producing a stream of 427 Cobras, but demand for the Shelby GT350 was so strong that Shelby had to move to larger facilities in order to accommodate all the production. For all intents and purposes, Carroll Shelby was on top of the automotive world and could do no wrong. Which is usually the point where things start flying off the rails.

Ever the businessman, as well as the racer, Shelby couldn’t help but notice the increasing notoriety and prize money being thrown at the SCCA’s newly formed Canadian-American Challenge Cup Series (Can-Am). With significant prize and appearance money made possible by title sponsor Johnson Wax, the Can-Am almost instantly became one of the world’s richest racing series. With this lucrative race series literally in his backyard, and with Ford literally pouring buckets of money in the front door of Shelby American for both its race and road cars, how could Shelby not field an entry? So Shelby approached Ford about throwing in some extra budget for a two-car Can-Am effort for the 1967 season. With Shelby’s recent results and racing pedigree, how could Ford say no? While Ford did agree to back Shelby’s effort, the Blue Oval did surprise Ol’ Shel in that not only did they fund Shelby’s Can-Am project, they also funded a competing project from cross-country rivals Holman-Moody.

So with not long before the start of the 1967 Can-Am season, Shelby had a budget, but he also had some problems. Ford’s Le Mans program (and budget) was massive, and clearly the race team’s first priority. Also, with production of the GT350 in full swing, he needed to move from his original Venice, California, shop (previously the home of Lance Reventlow’s Scarab team) to larger facilities near Los Angeles International airport. Shelby had the money to do the Can-Am, but he lacked the facilities and the resources to take on the construction of yet another racecar. As luck would have it, the solution to Shelby’s dilemma would be found half a world away, in the UK.

Transatlantic Automotive Consultants

Racecar designer Len Terry had started out working as a draftsman, when he was subcontracted to Aston Martin to help with the DB2/4. After that, he worked at Lotus for a number of years until he was summarily sacked when a side project, his Terrier MkII, did so well in the hands of Brian Hart that it regularly trounced the Lotus competition! However, it was only a matter of time before Chapman asked Terry to return and lend his hand with the new Lotus Indy 500 program. Terry designed the Lotus 29 and 34, which came tantalizing close to winning the Hoosier classic, but in 1965 he was given full control of the project and the resultant Lotus 38, with Jim Clark behind the wheel, came good to register the first rear-engine win at Indy.

One driver who took notice of the Lotus 38’s impressive performance was Clark’s teammate Dan Gurney. When Gurney decided that he would build and race his own car in the 1966 Formula One World Championship, he knew the designer he needed on board, Len Terry. So, right after Clark’s historic Indy win in 1965, Terry moved to California and began work on what would become the Eagle Grand Prix car, which Gurney drove to his historic win at Spa, in ’67. However, after the Eagle F1 project had run its course, Terry moved back to England and in February of 1967, entered into a new partnership with Frank Nichols of Elva Cars fame, and U.S. Lola importer Carl Haas to create Transatlantic Automotive Consultants (TAC). The goal of TAC was to combine Terry’s design prowess with Nichols’ design and manufacturing experience to create a new company that could design and build prototype race and street cars for manufacturers. As luck (or perhaps fate) would have it, Carroll Shelby became TAC’s first client.

Terry’s brief from Shelby was to design a Can-Am contender around a new prototype, aluminum block, 351-cu.in. V8 with Gurney-Weslake heads that was an experimental offshoot of Ford’s Le Mans engine program. By the time the deal was put in place, however, TAC had scant time to design and construct the car before the start of the Can-Am season. Since Shelby and Gurney were working closely together at the time (Shelby having been a founding partner in Gurney’s AAR), Terry found he could save some time by taking advantage of many existing pieces from the AAR parts bin, including the wheels and uprights that he had designed for the F1 Eagle. While Terry designed a fairly conventional monocoque, constructed from 18-gauge aluminum, he was able to incorporate several fairly radical, advanced concepts into the new design.

Crossing Over

In 1962, Terry designed a small-displacement sports racer called the Terrier Mark 6 to compete against the then-dominant Lotus 23. Central to his design, was a new “cross-over” suspension system. Terry’s goal was two-fold; to lower the frontal area of the Mark 6 and to create a suspension system that decoupled the bump and anti-roll controls in such a way that each could be individually adjusted without affecting the other.

In a “traditional” suspension system, where each wheel is suspended by a spring and connected to its opposing mate by an anti-roll bar, the anti-roll bar contributes a certain amount of “spring action” to the wheel, while the springs also contribute a certain amount of anti-roll resistance—essentially these two key suspension properties are intrinsically linked. In the Terrier Mark 6, however, Terry designed a suspension where the front and rear wheels utilized a single, transversely mounted spring that was connected to either wheel’s upright by a link and rocker arm on either side. Thus, as the weight of the car settled, both wheels would push on their respective rocker arms, which would in turn squeeze the transversely mounted spring in the middle. In laying out the suspension this way, the central springs could be quickly changed to adjust the resistance to vertical wheel travel, while the anti-roll bars could be separately adjusted to affect the car’s roll stiffness. Another benefit of this system was the fact that the car would also enjoy a very low roll center.

In addition to the new suspension system, Terry took the Terrier’s front-mounted radiator and laid it down horizontally so that the outgoing airflow would exit under the car rather than above. This enabled Terry to lower the bodywork by some three inches to create a much lower frontal area and presumably more slippery aerodynamics.

Since the cross-over suspension and horizontally mounted radiator seemed to contribute much to the smaller Terrier sports racer’s competitiveness, Terry believed that it made logical sense to incorporate these into his larger Can-Am design for Shelby, since other Can-Am competitors, like Jim Hall and his Chaparrals, were also now pushing the envelope of advanced designs with improved aerodynamic efficiency.

The first example of Shelby’s new Can-Am contender did not arrive in California until August, just one month before the series’ opening round at Road America. Not only was this not much time to prepare, test and develop a completely new car, but also it couldn’t have arrived at a more inconvenient time as Shelby American was in the throes of trying to move into its new facility. Added to this, the new 351-cu.in. Ford V8 the car was designed around was not yet ready, so the car had to be quickly kitted out with a heavier 325-cu.in., flat-tappet V8 with conventional heads.

Under the watchful eye of famed engineer Phil Remington, mechanics John Collins and Mark Popov-Dadiani set about stripping the new car apart to prepare it for installation of the 325-cu.in. V8 engine along with a ZF five-speed gearbox that the crew connected to the rear wheels using halfshafts with solid-spline couplings (more on this later). According to Popov-Dadiani, “We started on that car at the Imperial (Venice, California) shop and we rebuilt it about 19 times before we even went racing with it.” Up to this point, the new car had been identified as the T-10 by TAC (T-10 being Len Terry’s 10th design) and in several early articles about the project, it had been referred to by the Shelby organization as the “Cougar-Cobra,” presumably as a promotional tie-in with Ford’s Mercury division and its Cougar sedan, which that year was also being campaigned in the Trans-Am. However, by the time the car actually made its debut outing, the team was referring to it as the “King Cobra,” harking back to the unofficial nickname for Shelby’s V8-powered Cooper sports racers from 1963-’64.

On August 14, the completed car was trucked out to Riverside Raceway for its first test. Driving duties for the new King Cobra were to be carried out by the Shelby team’s Trans-Am hot shoe, Jerry Titus, who would be joined by teammate A.J. Foyt once the second car was completed. Also present for that first day of testing was Len Terry, who was flown in especially for the occasion, as well as Phil Remington, team administrator Al Dowd, Shelby Le Mans team engineer Carroll Smith and Shelby himself. Sadly, it didn’t go at all as planned.

First, problems arose with the engine, or rather engines, as the team spun the bearings on two engines before they could get the problem sorted out (Len Terry later commented: “…in my opinion this was because the oil was inadequately warmed up before the car was driven hard.”) Then, once the car would run in earnest, Titus complained the new Cobra suffered from push in fast corners, slow steering, a flat engine and a serious tendency to overheat. Titus and Remington immediately pointed to the unconventional cross-over suspension system as being the culprit for the evil handling. Terry countered that the car had been designed to run on roller-spline couplings in the halfshafts and not the solid-spline couplings that the Shelby team had installed. Terry would later remark, “…the roller-spline couplings had not been obtained, so the car was run with normal solid-spline type, and its handling difficulties proved very intractable. Although these could have been largely due to the splines locking up under power or braking, rather than to any serious deficiency elsewhere, the cross-over suspension was condemned by Shelby’s driver, the late Jerry Titus, and engineer Phil Remington, neither of whom appeared to like the idea from the start.”

If Titus and Remington didn’t like the cross-over suspension at the start, they certainly didn’t like it later in the test when one of the central springs “popped out,” as team photographer Dave Friedman put it, causing the system to collapse. With only 10 days until the Shelby was slated to make its debut at the Road America season opener, the program looked to be in a shambles.

Much to Len Terry’s disgust, Phil Remington came to the conclusion that there was not enough time to develop the unconventional King Cobra, and the only viable option was to rebuild it into a more “conventional” design. As a result, Terry washed his hands of the project and flew back to England, while Remington and crew proceed to re-jig the suspension into a conventional coil-over system (fortunately Terry had deigned in provisions to do this if required.) Additionally, the team relocated the radiator into the more traditional vertical position, which required the modification of the bodywork to allow venting out the upper front surface, as well as the addition of two large front canards on either side to try and stick the front end down, while a large wickerbill was added onto the back to aid rear-end grip. Despite all these modifications—or perhaps because of them— the team still did not elect to convert the halfshaft couplings to the roller-spline type the car was originally designed for.

While the car ended up missing the first four races of the season held in September, it did finally make its debut at the Riverside round held in late October. Fortunately, by this time the team was able to install their special, new 351-cu.in., “XE 93532” aluminum block Ford V8 with Gurney-Weslake heads fed by four Weber 48 IDA downdraft carburetors.

Developed as part of Ford’s Le Mans engine program in 1966, this new 351-cu.in. V8, featured a 9.2inch deck with four-bolt mains on the center three caps, and would eventually become the foundation for the 351 Windsor and Cleveland production engines that would follow in 1969. While the original XE (XE signifying “Experimental non-production part”) castings were done in iron, Ford poured what is believed to be no more than six blocks in aluminum for the 1967 Can-Am program. This experimental engine was designed to produce around 500-hp, which in the 1325-lb chassis was a promising power-to-weight combination…for 1966. However, the competition from Chaparral and McLaren had not sat back idle in the offseason, and with these teams now running their own experimental, aluminum, 427-cu.in.. Big Block Chevy V8s, the King Cobra was now entering into the 1967 Can-Am fight underdeveloped and under-gunned.

What Might Have Been…

After making all the changes and improvements they could, the team was able to get that first chassis (#T-10/1) ready for Jerry Titus to race in the 10th Annual Times Grand Prix, held at Riverside Raceway on October 27-29. Titus’ competition included a pair of McLaren M6As for Bruce McLaren and Denis Hulme, a Chaparral 2G for Jim Hall, the rival Holman-Moody-entered Honker II-Ford for Mario Andretti and a phalanx of Lola T70s for the likes of Dan Gurney, Lothar Motschenbacher, Peter Revson, John Surtees, Parnelli Jones, Mark Donohue and George Follmer. In qualifying, Gurney’s Lola just captured the pole with a qualifying time of 1:39.3, over Bruce McLaren’s 1:39.6. Several seconds back the next fastest qualifiers were Hulme, Hall, Andretti, Revson, Motschenbacher, Surtees, Jones, Donohue, Follmer and then, in 12th position, was Titus, with a time of 1:44.0. In light of it being a 37-car field, this wasn’t a bad qualifying spot, considering how the King Cobra program had unfolded up to that point. However, again the fates would prove to be most unkind.

During the course of the weekend, the team became concerned that old gas in the King Cobra might be affecting the new engine’s performance. So the crew drained the tanks before the race and borrowed some fuel from a fellow competitor. Unfortunately, what the team did not know was that the borrowed fuel also contained certain undisclosed “additives,” most likely nitromethane, which immediately began its corrosive attack on the Cobra’s submerged fuel pumps. Titus only managed three laps of the race before the fuel pumps gave up the ghost and he was forced to retire.

Bad Stardust Memories

Licking their wounds, the disillusioned team had a couple of weeks to rebuild and recover before the season-ending round at Las Vegas’ Stardust Raceway. By this time, two more chassis had been delivered to Shelby (#T-10/2, #T-10/3), but funding from Ford had been cut off (Ford cancelled its Le Mans program after its victory that June), so there were no longer any plans (or money) to construct a second car for A.J. Foyt to run—and, quite frankly, it was all they could do to get the one chassis to run!

At Stardust, Titus and the King Cobra pretty much picked up where they left off, running again 12th fastest overall, only now having reduced the gap to poleman McLaren from four seconds, down to three. But, yet again, fortune was not kind to Titus, as a suspension piece failed during a pre-race practice, sending him and the Cobra on a wild, desert rock-collecting trip that all but buried half the car. For Titus and the entire Shelby team, the buried car almost seemed an ironically appropriate ending to what had seemed like such a promising new program just a handful of months prior.

As much as the team may have wanted to leave the King Cobra buried in the Nevada desert, they needed the experimental aluminum block engine out of it, so they dug it out and unceremoniously carted it back to Los Angeles, where the car was dismantled. Strangely, despite Titus’ feelings toward the King Cobra, “I was very unhappy with the last one in almost every respect and suspect the feeling was mutual as far as your management personnel were concerned,” he purchased the body and tub of #T-10/1 with the idea of using it as the starting point for a car of his own construction! However, the project never materialized and eventually Titus hauled the body and the tub to a local dump!

Just after the Stardust debacle, Shelby was only too happy to sell the other rolling chassis (#T-10/2) and spare tub (#T-10/3) to local Southern California entrant Mike Koslowsky. Koslowsky built up chassis #T-10/2 with a small block Chevy and entered the now College Chevrolet-sponsored car in events for an up-and-coming driver named Skeeter McKitterick. Koslowsky entered McKitterick and the King Cobra in an SCCA National race at Ontario Motor Speedway, on September 9, 1970, where McKitterick started a lowly 41st on the mixed grid (ASR, BSR, AP, BP and AS divisions), yet managed to finish an impressive 3rd behind the winning McLaren M6B of Jay Hills and the 2nd place Vasek Polak-entered Porsche 906 driven by John Morton. Perhaps emboldened by the Ontario success, Koslowsky then entered McKitterick in the November 1 running of that year’s Riverside Can-Am round. Starting from 27th on the grid, McKitterick was able to exorcise a few of the King Cobra’s Riverside demons by actually finishing the race in a respectable 14th position. Not only was finishing the race an accomplishment for the King Cobra, but considering the fact that it was a Can-Am car conceived in 1966-’67 and now competing against state-of-the-art McLaren M8Ds and the Chaparral 2J, made this result all the more impressive.

In 1971, Koslowsky sold the car to a Memphis Tennessee Ford dealership owner named Hull Dobbs. Dobbs parked the car in his showroom for the next eight years, until Dobbs and his son Jimmy commenced on a nine-year restoration. In 1988, the car was sold to Ed Cudahy, a Colorado vintage racer, who in turn sold it to Rod Taylor, who later sold it to Craig McCaw. Shortly thereafter, McCaw traded the King Cobra to Jim Glese.

Glese campaigned the car until he crashed it in a historic race, at which time Glese enlisted Byron Sanborn at Vintage Racing Motors of Seattle, Washington, to rebuild the car. But since Glese stood a towering 6 feet 10 inches (!), he asked Sanborn to lengthen the chassis by 1.5 inches in order to accommodate his long frame. Some time later, the now-elongated King Cobra was purchased by Tom Armstrong, who in turn sold it to Mike Claudio in 2004. From Claudio, the car moved to the collection of the late John O’Quinn. In 2010, the car’s current custodian, Greg Mitchell of Coos Bay, Oregon, purchased the car and sent it to Scott Drnek’s Virtuoso Performance to have the car completely restored back to its original 1967 configuration.

Key to Mitchell and Virtuoso’s painstaking restoration was the location of an original Ford XE engine. Due to the XE’s inherent fragility (having been cast in aluminum, from a mold originally intended for iron, the bottom end proved too weak for the horsepower), most of that original batch was either destroyed on the dyno or while racing. Mitchell believes that he is now in possession of the last surviving example, on which Virtuoso had to do some complicated re-engineering in order to make it a reliable power plant for vintage racing.

Interestingly, before commencing the restoration, Virtuoso’s Drnek test drove the car and found it to be extremely twitchy and abrupt as it transitioned through corners—mirroring the original complaints of Jerry Titus. After disassembling the car, they found that it was still utilizing the same type of sliding-spline halfshafts installed by Remington. However, after restoring the car with Terry’s originally intended roller-spline shafts, Drnek found that this one change totally transformed the handling of the car—vindicating Terry’s design, albeit some 46 years too late!

Driving the King

Greg Mitchell offered me the chance to test drive his King Cobra at Sonoma Raceway, which coincidentally was where I got to test drive the earlier Shelby Cooper King Cobra two years ago, so it would be interesting to see how the two Shelby sports racers compared.

Just on outward appearances, the later Can-Am King Cobra looks longer, lower and a bit more menacing, with that somewhat protruding nose and the more prominent “haunchy” fender arches.

Climbing into the King Cobra is the first challenge, as one has to step over/around the downward-hinged doors, while also stepping over the extremely wide sill of the monocoque, which houses the fuel bladders on either side. Sliding down into the loosely leather-covered seat I encounter my second challenge—I don’t fit! Now, I’ve been able to twist and contort my six-foot frame into any number of racecars that were not designed for me and in all those cases, while I might not have been necessarily comfortable, I’ve been adequately able to drive the car. But the King Cobra offered a singularly unique obstacle. If you look at the photos of the dashboard bulkhead, you’ll see that it extends very low into the leg well of the cockpit, on both sides. Unfortunately, the bulkhead came down low enough that the only way I could keep my hips in the seat and have my feet on the pedals was if my knees were jacked up into the bottom edge of the bulkhead. However, with the seatbelts cinched down I was so wedged in that I couldn’t get my left foot on and off the clutch pedal. And, since Scott Drnek had just, moments before, warned me about not riding the difficult-to-replace clutch, I knew I couldn’t drive the car this way. After a few minutes of discussion with Drnek and his crew, they graciously offered to move the pedals for me, which seemed above and beyond the call of duty. Not wanting to put my hosts through that, I suggested that maybe we could first try and pull all the seating material out to see if I could get just a bit more knee room. Fortunately, that was just enough change to shift my hips back an inch or two, which bought me the room to be able to move my knees a skosh…crisis averted!

Once strapped in, it was just a question of switching on the ignition, fuel pump and cranking the starter over before that one-of-kind aluminum 351 barked to life. Having now driven a number of both big and small block Can-Am cars, the King Cobra’s engine note, like its displacement, fell somewhere in the middle—a bit deeper and raspier than the small blocks, but not quite the nuclear Armageddon released by the fuel-injected Big Blocks. Little did I know that my biggest challenge of the day still lay ahead.

While the convention, among most purpose-built, two-seater racecars is to put the driver on the right-hand side—since most tracks run clockwise and therefore the driver would more times than not be on the apex-side of the car—Terry designed the King Cobra not only with a right-hand side driver, but oddly a center shifter. The first problem this creates is that for a car expressly designed for American competition, the center-shift, would force American drivers to shift with their off hand. And, as if this wasn’t challenging enough, by running the linkage down the center and then having to go around that big 351 lump and into the ZF gearbox from the right side of the car (!) this created an extremely convoluted linkage chain that not only has a very narrow gate, but also some odd shift characteristics. Compounding all of this is the added challenge that this particular ZF gearbox has a unique “sequencer” mechanism that, much like a motorcycle’s gearbox, forces the driver to go up and down the gears in sequence, i.e., you cannot skip any gears. Drnek warned me that when shifting gears, you had to make sure that the lever moved in a true H-pattern, with the shifter coming back to the center before moving it forward or back, otherwise the linkage would balk. This made the prospect of missed shifts a heightened possibility, which was worrisome considering the “only-one-of-its-kind” nature of the engine! So, after some help from Drnek to actually find first gear, I released the clutch and the King and I made our way out onto Sonoma Raceway.

Once up to speed on the track, the first revelation is the engine’s incredibly wide power band. The 351, sucking through those big Weber downdrafts, has amazing low rpm grunt out of the corners and really aggressive acceleration up to its 6,000 rpm redline. I’m thankful for the engine’s flexibility because more than once I find myself struggling to be able to go back and forth from third gear to fourth! In fact, after two or three initial laps, where I cannot get into fourth at all, I meekly come back in to have the team check to see if there is anything wrong with the gearbox. After being assured that it’s just me not being diligent enough with the forward-right-forward requirements of that shift, I go back out and discover that it does in fact have a fourth and fifth gear (!), I just have to mentally over-compensate for the rigid nature of the shift pattern.

With more gears and increased speed, I now get to the crux of this ultimate iteration of the King Cobra—its handling. While the turn-in is sharp and accurate, there is an unusual, kind of “floaty” feeling as the initial weight transfer loads the cross-over suspension system. It’s not vague, but it is a different sensation than I am used to, having driven essentially nothing but “conventionally” suspended racecars for 20-plus years. Interestingly, in the broader and higher speed turns I don’t notice it so much, but in the quick, back-and-forth of Sonoma’s signature esses, I’m more aware of it as the rapid weight transfer from side-to-side increases as I accelerate through the progression of turns. Once I finally start to get comfortable with the awkward shifter and the unusual weight transfer of the cross-over suspension, I begin to see how quick the King Cobra really can be.

Now that the King Cobra has been fully sorted out, and perhaps most importantly, finally set up exactly as Len Terry had originally intended, it has become a very capable Can-Am car. This point has been more than proved by Scott Drnek’s ability to put the car near the front of the current historic Can-Am field, despite the presence of much bigger and more modern cars. However, it’s not hard to see how Jerry Titus—who up to that point had not raced this highly evolved a purpose-built racecar—would have been challenged by the car’s many peculiar quirks, despite having little time to come to grips with it.

As with so many racecars, the King Cobra Can-Am will remain one of those tantalizing “What if” racers. Had there been more time to develop Len Terry’s original vision properly, or had the car come to fruition in 1966, rather than 1967, who knows how the course of history might have changed? Would cross-over suspensions have become mainstream? Would this not have been the final purpose-built racing Cobra? While the King Cobra’s central problem was its unique suspension system being bound up by the wrong halfshaft couplings, in broader terms, perhaps the entire project was really just bound up by fate.

SPECIFICATIONS

Chassis: Aluminum monocoque

Bodywork: Aluminum

Wheelbase: 95 inches

Track (Front): 54 inches

Track (Rear): 53.5 inches

Width: 65 inches

Height: 33.5 inches

Weight: 1,435 pounds

Suspension: Single-spring, rocker-arm-activated cross-over (front and rear) with anti-roll bars and telescopic shock absorbers.

Engine: Ford 351-cid V8, Aluminum XE93532 Block, Gurney-Weslake heads.

Induction: Four Weber 48 IDA carburetors

Gearbox: ZF 5-speed

RESOURCES / ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Baker, Alan and Terry, Len, Racing Car Design and Development, ISBN 0-8376-0080-4

Mills, Rinsey, Carroll Shelby: The Authorized Biography, ISBN 978-0-7603-4056-1

Friedman, Dave, Remembering the Shelby Years 1962–1969, ISBN 0-966-7798-8-4

Friedman, Dave, Shelby American Racing History, ISBN 0-7603-0309-6

Lyons, Pete, Can-Am, ISBN 0-7603-0017-8

Hammil, Des, Ford Small Block V8 Racing Engines 1962–1970, ISBN 9781845844257

World Register of Cobras & GT40s, Kopec/Eber Publishing

The author would like to thank Greg Mitchell for providing access to both the King Cobra and his extensive collection of photos and documentation. Thanks also go to Scott Drnek and the team at Virtuoso Performance for the top-notch trackside support provided, as well as the staff at Sonoma Raceway for providing access to their wonderful facilities.