Meet the Fleet – Sportscars: AC Cobra 427SC

• BODY: Dash Motorsports
• WHEEL & TIRES: Road Race Replicas

This is yet another very high dollar car I had to bite the bullet and dig deep to acquire. Perhaps I overpaid, but…look at it! This is one of those cases where, the moment I saw it, all reason left the building and the price didn’t matter: I just had to have it! Part of the reason for that salivating “buy it now-fever” was the color; at the time I bought it, this was the first silver car I had acquired for my collection, and I think silver is a particularly good color on the Cobra roadster (well to be frank, I think it’s a particularly good color on almost any car!) Then add the amazing detail-the chrome plated front and rear bumpers, side exhausts, and roll bar cast as separate pieces-the sun visors on the windshield, the seat belt laying across the passenger’s seat-and top it off with a driver properly wearing a helmet with a shield ready to race, and I would have paid even more for it than I did!

Now of course it needs to be said that all this detail comes at a price, and that price is higher than just what I paid for it: this is a very fragile car, and thus I have to be careful with it. As a result, it has never quite achieved the upper echelons of speed and performance the real things are known for. I’ve had to be content to “detune” it a bit to keep it from flying off the track during exuberant moments in a race, as getting out of control with it would surely result in broken parts. This is not to say she’s a “no-go showboat,” though; far from it! With a low-mileage chassis and a set of meaty silicone tires on “Cobra” wheels (what else?) she is competitive against many comers, but most enthuaists know these big-block beasts are notoriously hard to handle, and require the utmost skill in opening them up. Maybe our helmeted driver, “Iceheart” Singleton, isn’t quite living up to his cold nickname and is taking it a little easy at times in order to stay alive! After all, absolutely no one wants to see this happen! :-0

Ouch…that’s gonna cost more than I paid for my little T-jet! So that’s why this member of my fleet, at racing number 58, got the nickname of “Grim Reaper!”