Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe

A cobra rears up because verticality is a threat display. It is also, at 190 miles an hour, catastrophic aerodynamics.

This was Shelby American’s problem in 1963. The roadster had the engine. It did not have the shape. On the long straights of Le Mans and Reims the Ferrari 250 GTO simply walked away from it, because a GTO had been drawn by people who had thought about air and the Cobra had been drawn in 1953 by people who had thought about elegance.

The solution came from a young designer named Peter Brock, who proposed something that the shop floor initially regarded as a joke: a Kammback coupé body over the existing chassis, drawn from the aerodynamic theory of Wunibald Kamm and Reinhard von Koenig-Fachsenfeld. Cut the tail off. Let the air separate cleanly rather than dragging a vacuum behind it. The result looked like nothing else on a grid — high-shouldered, snub-tailed, with a windscreen raked like a held breath.

Six were built. Six. That number recurs in serpent history with a frequency the Ophidiary declines to call coincidence.

In 1965 Shelby American took the GT division of the FIA World Sportscar Championship — the first time an American constructor had won an international championship of that kind. Ferrari had been beaten with a car whose underlying architecture had been designed in Surrey a decade earlier for a four-cylinder engine that no longer existed. It remains one of the great acts of automotive taxidermy.

The most famous of the six, CSX2287, then did something no other championship-winning car has done: it disappeared into a storage unit and stayed there, in the dark, for close to thirty years, while its ownership became a matter for lawyers rather than historians. When it finally emerged it was made the first entry on the United States National Historic Vehicle Register — the automotive equivalent of being declared a national monument.

There is a particular kind of snake that spends most of its life motionless underground and is nonetheless never described as lazy. The Daytona Coupe spent three decades in a lock-up. It was not dormant. It was, in the technical herpetological sense, brumating.