Taxonomy
Ultra-rare
9 entries
-
Book I
Shelby 427 Cobra Super Snake
Two built. One of them ate its owner.
Shelby took the most frightening car he had ever sold, bolted two superchargers to it, and built exactly two. He kept one. The other one is the…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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.