Taxonomy
Coupés
24 entries
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Book I
Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe
The snake that grew a shell to go faster in a straight line
Six were built to solve one problem: an open Cobra could out-accelerate a Ferrari and could not out-run one down the Mulsanne. Peter Brock put a…
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Book II
Dodge Viper
Ten cylinders, no apology, side pipes that burned the calf of every passenger
In 1989 Chrysler showed a red concept roadster with a V10 out of a truck. In 1992 it sold that car, essentially unaltered, to the public — without…
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Book II
Mitsuoka Orochi
Named for an eight-headed serpent that had to be made drunk before it could be killed
A small Japanese coachbuilder named its supercar after the eight-headed, eight-tailed serpent of the Kojiki — a creature so large that moss and…
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Book II
Dodge Viper GTS-R
The snake that went to France and made a noise nobody had permission for
A blue-and-white American V10 with a hood the size of a dining table won its class at Le Mans three years running and then won the Rolex 24 at…
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Book II
Ford Mustang SVT Cobra
A horse wearing a snake, which nobody has ever satisfactorily explained
For eleven years Ford sold a car whose bonnet said Mustang and whose flanks said Cobra, an act of zoological confusion so complete that it has…
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Book II
Shelby GT500 Super Snake
One was built. Shelby wanted fifty. The price made it a species of one.
Built to destroy tyres for Goodyear in the Texas heat, the 1967 GT500 Super Snake was meant to be the first of fifty. It cost too much. Exactly one…
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Book II
Ford Mustang Cobra R
Sold without a radio, without air conditioning, and without a back seat, to people who had to prove they could use it
Three times, Ford built a Mustang with the sound deadening removed, the rear seat deleted and the stereo left out of the parts list, and required…
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Book II
Ford Falcon XC Cobra
A falcon and a cobra on the same car, in a country with more venomous snakes than any other
Four hundred were built to clear a stock of leftover hardtop bodies. Ford Australia painted them white with blue stripes, numbered them on the…
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Book II
Ford Torino Cobra
A large flat car with a snake on it and no intention of turning
Ford applied the Cobra name to its mid-size Torino, fitted the 428 Cobra Jet as standard, and sold the result to people who wanted the snake but…
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Book II
Ford Mustang Cobra II
A snake made almost entirely of stickers
In the depths of the American malaise era, Ford sold a Mustang with racing stripes, a bonnet scoop that led nowhere, a rear spoiler, a cobra badge…
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Book III
Hennessey Venom GT
A Texan twin-turbo V8 wearing a Lotus like a stolen skin
Take a Lotus Exige, lengthen it, remove its engine, insert seven litres of twin-turbocharged American V8, and give the result a name that refers not…
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Book III
Hennessey Venom F5
Named twice for things that cannot be survived
The F5 refers to the top of the old Fujita tornado scale — winds above 261 miles per hour, damage described in the literature as “incredible”. The…
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Book V
De Tomaso Mangusta
The mongoose. Named, allegedly, as an insult, and shaped like an apology for it.
Mangusta is Italian for mongoose: the small, fast, faintly rabid carnivore famous for one thing, which is killing cobras. Alejandro de Tomaso built…
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Book V
Plymouth Road Runner
Named after a cartoon, which was named after a bird, which genuinely does kill rattlesnakes
Chrysler paid Warner Bros. fifty thousand dollars for the name and ten thousand more for a horn that said beep beep. The actual bird runs down…
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Book V
Apollo Intensa Emozione
Named for the god who killed the Python and then took its oracle for himself
Apollo’s first recorded act on reaching Delphi was to kill the serpent that lived there. He then established his oracle on the spot and named its…
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Book V
Aspark Owl
Silent, nocturnal, and arrives without a sound — which is precisely the problem for a snake
An electric hypercar from Osaka with four motors, roughly two thousand horsepower, and a name belonging to the one predator a snake genuinely cannot…
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Book VI
SSC Tuatara
The last survivor of a lineage that split from the snakes a quarter of a billion years ago
The tuatara is not a lizard. It is the only surviving member of Rhynchocephalia, an entire order that split from the squamates — the lizards and…
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Book VI
Chevrolet Corvette Stingray
A cartilaginous fish with a venomous barb. Venomous — but not a snake, and not even close.
The most commonly misfiled car in this entire subject. It is venomous, which fools people. It is a fish, which settles it.
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Book VI
De Tomaso Pantera
The mongoose gave up and became a cat
Having named one car after the cobra’s natural predator, Alejandro de Tomaso named the next one after a big cat and sold it through Lincoln-Mercury…
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Book VI
Plymouth Barracuda
Beat the Mustang to market by two weeks and has been losing the argument ever since
Launched in April 1964, sixteen days before the Ford Mustang, and comprehensively out-sold by it for a decade. A fast, toothy, ambush-oriented fish…
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Book VI
Bolwell Nagari
It sounds exactly like the Sanskrit for serpent. It is not the Sanskrit for serpent.
Bolwell, an Australian glass-fibre specialist, named its Ford V8 sports car Nagari. Every reader of Indian mythology stops dead at that word. The…
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Book VI
Iso Grifo
A griffin: eagle in front, lion behind. Both halves eat snakes.
Giugiaro drew it, Bizzarrini engineered it, Chevrolet supplied the V8, and the name is a mythological composite of the two animals most reliably…
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Book VI
Opel Manta
A ray that does not even have the venom
The manta ray is a filter feeder with no sting, no venom and no interest in you. Opel named a coupé after it in 1970 and Germany turned that coupé…
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Book VI
Monteverdi Hai 450 SS
Swiss, Hemi-powered, and named “shark” in German
Peter Monteverdi built a mid-engined supercar in Basel with a 426 Hemi behind the driver and called it the Shark. Almost nobody has ever seen one.