Taxonomy
V8
23 entries
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Book I
Shelby Cobra
The word that arrived before the car did
A Texan with a bad heart put an American engine into an English roadster and then, according to the only witness, dreamt its name at three in the…
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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…
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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
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 428 Cobra Jet
Not a car. An engine that became a promise.
The Cobra Jet is the only entry in this book that has no bodywork of its own. It is a cylinder head philosophy that Ford has been re-issuing for…
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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 II
Ford Fairlane 500 Cobra
The cheapest way to buy a snake in 1969
Ford took its plainest mid-size body, installed the 428 Cobra Jet, deleted almost every comfort, and undercut everyone. Rubber floor mats. Bench…
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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 IV
TVR Chimaera
Lion at the front, goat in the middle, serpent at the back — which is the end you have to watch
Homer describes the Chimera as lion in front, goat in the middle and serpent behind. TVR built a Rover V8 roadster with no traction control, no…
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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 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
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.