As my collection of Aurora originals has continued to grow and I’ve slowed on buying them because I have so much of what I wanted, I’m going back to taking a second look at some of the ones I passed on. I already did this before a couple of years ago with “The Unwanted Mustangs,” but there are a few other body styles from the classic Aurora years that I’ve missed, and I recently secured 2 good copies of another one I’ve overlooked.
Like my previous entry on the Ferrari 250GTO, I may have dismissed the Aurora copy of the Cobra Daytona Coupe for the wrong reason: because the modern-day rendition of the same car by Auto World is so good that I had no need to bother. And, as with the Ferrari, that makes no sense, considering the Auto World versions of this car race with my Ultra G numbered racing fleet, which exists apart from The Road Crew. So I came across a pair for sale, one with a chassis and one without, and though they weren’t cheap, I picked them up because they were in good, clean condition and I liked the green and white combination.
The Cobra coupe is very small even for an Aurora original, but its small in a way that is proportional to most of the other cars from this era (the Cobra roadster being an exception, which is significantly larger in scale in comparison to other Aurora bodies). The white version is common, but the olive green one is harder to come by, which is why I picked this pair over others I found for sale in more common yellow, turquoise, tan, or red.
Both bodies were in good shape but needed cleaning, and they got it via my usual methods. The green one on the chassis did run when powered and came back with a good cleaning, but it was too slow for a sports racer, so it was set aside for a future application and mounted on the very fast “modified” closed rivet chassis that my yellow Alfa Romeo came on. As for the white one, I decided to mount that on the open-rivet chassis that my dark green MGB GT came on, with the threaded axles and aluminum wheels and super-sticky tires. Worked out great!
Both cars run around the HO highway with the Ford GT 40s, the Jaguar E-types, the Porsche 904’s and the Ferrari GTOs and look right at home doing so! Its true that most of The Road Crew are roadgoing passenger cars and muscle cars, but the sports and racing side of this fleet is growing.
So what’s next? I’m thinking its time to pick up another Chaparral 2A, a good clean one, to match the almost mint bright red Elva I got some time ago. That car, incidentally, just recently got remounted on a better chassis, again in keeping with higher performance for a sports car.
Will I be getting more copies of the original Cobra Coupe? Maybe; not planning on it at this time, but you know what the “collector’s disease” is like! I’m sure happy with this pair, though; usually I look for dogs for restore but in this case I paid a high-ish price for a pair of good ones, and that works too!
These are some great looking models and it sounds like the mechanics at Drag City are taking good care of these beauties! The cars certainly add to the collection!