Shelby 427 Cobra Super Snake

There is a point past which an animal stops being an animal and becomes a moral question. The 427 Cobra was already at that point. It had 7.0 litres of side-oiler big-block, a wheelbase you could measure with a school ruler, and a driver sitting more or less on the rear axle with nothing but hope between him and the differential.

In 1966 Shelby had two of them fitted with twin Paxton superchargers. This is not tuning. This is a dare submitted in writing.

He kept the first for himself and used it, by all accounts, as a personal car, which in Carroll Shelby’s vocabulary meant something closer to a personal argument. The second went to Bill Cosby, who found it unusable, returned it, and later built a comedy routine around the experience of being handed a machine with no interest in the concept of survival. The routine was funny. What happened to that second car afterwards was not: it passed to another owner and was destroyed in a fatal accident.

The Ophidiary records this plainly, without relish. A car is not a murderer. But a car can be an unanswered question about how much power a chassis should be asked to hold, and when the question goes unanswered long enough, someone eventually answers it with their life. Every serpent name in this book carries that footnote in fine print. The Super Snake simply prints it in a larger typeface.

Shelby’s own car survived, and did the thing that surviving legends do: it appreciated. In 2007 it crossed an auction block for five and a half million dollars, at the time the most anyone had paid for an American car at public sale. The number is obscene and also, in its way, correct. You are not buying horsepower. You are buying the only remaining half of a two-unit species.

This is what supercharging a snake actually means. Not more speed — the 427 already had more speed than the road deserved. What the Paxtons added was inevitability. A normally aspirated Cobra waits to be provoked. A Super Snake has already decided.