IN 1960, RETIRED RACE car driver and winner at Le Mans, Carroll Shelby designed a small sports car that would use the AC cars from England with Ford’s new small block V-8 engine. The way it worked was to ship the engines to England where they were installed in the AC Ace, and then the car was shipped to Shelby’s shop in Los Angeles.
The original Cobras, of which there were only 75 built, came with the 260-hp engine bolted to a fourspeed transmission, and weighed in at 2,100-pounds. Estimated top speed was somewhere around 140 mph. However, it wasn’t long before the 289 was available from Ford, and Shelby quickly switched over to the new engine. Race prepared, the new 271-hp, 289-cid V-8 could produce up to 370 h.p., and now it was a whole different ballgame. In the CSX 2000 series, approximately 580 Shelby 289 Cobras were sold. This would have been between 1963 and 1965, and CSX 2182 would have been one of those cars.