Shelby King Cobra – The Serpent King

The late ’50s and early ’60s were a time of tremendous change in American road racing. The cars were changing—front-engine sports cars and home-built specials were being challenged by a growing onslaught of lightweight, mid-engined machines like the Lotus 19 and the Cooper Monaco. Concomitantly, the very nature of the races was changing as well. Starting in 1958, USAC began to hold “professional” sports car races, challenging both the SCCA’s stranglehold on road racing and the SCCA’s core tenet that it remains an “amateur” racing organization. However, once USAC released the professional genie from the bottle, there was no turning back. The combination of prize money and publicity transformed sports car racing from a hobby into a business and in the process dramatically increased the level of technology and competition. By 1962, fearing that they might lose their control of American road racing, the SCCA announced that it too, would launch its own professional road racing series, in 1963, dubbing it the United States Road Racing Championship, or USRRC. American sports car racing was entering a brave new world.

 Building a Better Mouse Trap

As early as 1955, Cooper Cars in the UK, began building a mid-engined, full-bodied F2 car designed to have minimal frontal area, as a way to maximize the potential of the small displacement (1,098-cc) Coventry Climax engine. This new car came to be known as the “Manx,” or the “Bobtail” and would prove to be groundbreaking not only for Cooper, but for motor racing in general. Jack Brabham’s success with the car would open the design floodgates for a whole new generation of single-seater racers. Of course, it didn’t take Cooper long to realize that by shifting the driver to the side and adding an additional seat, the Bobtail could easily be transformed into a sports racer and so, in November 1958, Cooper debuted the new “Monaco,” a sports racer that could accept either the 1.5 or 2-liter Coventry Climax engine.