Ford Mustang SVT Cobra

Consider what is actually being claimed. The Mustang is a free-roaming horse of the American west, an animal defined by flight, herd behaviour and a total absence of venom. The cobra is a solitary elapid that kills by neurotoxin and threatens by standing up. Ford put both on the same car, in the same paint, for over a decade, and the American public accepted this without a single recorded complaint.

The mechanism was Special Vehicle Team, an in-house skunkworks formed in 1991 whose job was to take ordinary Fords and make them tolerable to enthusiasts. Their Mustang got the coiled snake — a badge Ford had used since the Shelby years, inherited directly from Book I — along with better brakes, better suspension and, in the good years, a great deal more engine.

The high point arrived at the end. The 2003–2004 Cobra, known universally by its internal codename Terminator, carried a supercharged 4.6-litre DOHC V8 rated at 390 horsepower, an independent rear suspension, and an iron block that the aftermarket discovered would absorb roughly twice its rated output before complaining. It remains one of the great modifiable engines in history, which is another way of saying that Ford accidentally sold a bottomless well of horsepower for the price of a family saloon.

The badge is the interesting part. It is not a Ford oval with a snake next to it. It is a snake, coiled, in profile, occupying the whole space where a corporate mark should be — the same posture used on the 1960s Shelby cars. For eleven years the fastest Mustang you could buy did not identify itself as a Ford, or entirely as a Mustang. It identified as a snake wearing a horse’s clothes.

The Ophidiary considers this the single most successful act of ophidian infiltration in industrial history. The snake did not need its own model line. It simply moved into somebody else’s and started answering the door.