2004 Ford Shelby V-10 Cobra Concept Ride Review: Still Venomous
4A concours-condition example of a 1991 Dodge Viper RT/10 or 2005 Ford GT should set you back somewhere between $115,000 and $350,000 in today's market. That's the Hagerty #1 condition valuation range currently covering used examples of these vehicles. Those were the two passion projects that preceded the car you see here, the Ford Shelby Cobra Concept, in lifelong engineer and perennial MotorTrend Car of the Year guest judge Chris Theodore's storied career.
Sadly, the reborn Shelby Cobra never made production, so this is the only example in existence. How do you put a value on a one-of-one concept/prototype both developed with and driven by a legend? It's scheduled to be auctioned during this year's Monterey Car Week, and someone's going to pay way more than the above sums to get it.
A Prototype Masquerading As A Concept Car
As we mentioned in our first report of the impending auction, the Ford Shelby Cobra Concept, known as "Project Daisy" at the time, was conceived as a way to leverage much of the bespoke engineering and capital costs Ford sunk into the all-aluminum GT. It also offered the Blue Oval the chance to more directly compete with the Dodge Viper, as well as high-end versions of the Chevy Corvette. Thus, to shorten its potential time to production, the Shelby Cobra Concept was engineered and developed to a level not seen in concept cars since the 1960s.
A viable aluminum chassis was developed to match the torsional rigidity of the contemporary Corvette, and the GT's suspension components were tuned to demonstrate the roadster's dynamic potential. The car was fully modeled in CAD, and its 6.4-liter (390 cubes for you Ford history buffs) modular twin-cam V-10 was dyno-tested to its 7,500-rpm redline.
Plus, Carroll Shelby, who consulted with the team throughout Daisy's gestation, gave about 150 miles' worth of spirited demonstration drives to the press (including MotorTrend's Matt Stone) at Irwindale Speedway the week prior to its January 2004 debut at the Detroit Auto Show. That speaks of the confidence this team had in the Shelby Cobra Concept's reliability.
Why The V-10?
Classic Cobras were all V-8s, and the GT's 5.4-liter engine was almost through development, but Theodore and his team foresaw the horsepower war on the horizon. They believed that a high-revving naturally aspirated V-10 good for 605 hp and 501 lb-ft out of the box could easily be twin-turbocharged to hit 700 or 800 horses in the years to come.
Relative to the GT's supercharged V-8, the V-10 of the Cobra Concept is lighter, has a lower center of gravity, and measures only 0.4 inch longer when fully dressed. And let's face it, a high-revving V-10 with a proper exhaust system incorporating a crossover "X-pipe" sounds awesome.
Why Didn't Daisy Get Produced?
Despite the team's thorough engineering and business plan development, the timing was poor to launch another low-margin halo vehicle. Ford was still recovering from the Firestone debacle, a recession was looming, and certain members of the company's management team simply underestimated the value of Shelby's name and affiliation.
Theodore and Shelby briefly considered licensing the concept from Ford and producing it as a Shelby, but with a forecast budget of $83,000,000 to bring it to market (well down from the estimated $150,000,000 spent to bring the GT to production), breaking even would have required selling 5,000 cars or more—a tall order only a company with an established dealer network could possibly achieve.
Sabotage Only A Chief Engineer Could Reverse
Because of all the press coverage that demonstrated the fully developed and certified concept's performance, Ford felt compelled to "defang" this Cobra, rendering it undrivable for liability purposes prior to its sale in 2017. (Auction proceeds from the sale were applied to the cost of restoring Fair Lane, the Ford patriarch's Dearborn home.)
To do this, the service plate used to access the connection between the output shaft connecting the flywheel/clutch assembly to the quill shaft (which sends power to the rear transaxle) was disconnected. The coupling was slid rearward and welded to the quill-shaft splines, while the output shaft splines were filled with weld, ruining the output shaft and permanently disconnecting the engine. The service plate bolts were ground off and welded shut to make the driveshaft inaccessible.
Theodore rectified this using replacement parts fabricated to the original designs by the same company that first produced these pieces. Of course, that wasn't all Daisy needed after about a dozen years of sitting still. The rubber bladder in the 10-gallon fuel cell was shot, the clutch was burned out, the hydraulic system that raises and lowers the hood was leaking, and the show-car electrical system needed to be converted to something more akin to production-spec. The team that originally assembled the chassis, Technosports in Livonia, Michigan, handled most of this restoration work.