Shelby Cobra vs Dodge Viper: two American icons battle it out… in Britain

Who else would you call? Although the Cobra was always more aligned with Ford (it kind of kickstarted the Ford/Shelby relationship that culminated in the GT40 Le Mans project), Dodge knew exactly what lightning it was trying to bottle with the Viper, and who to call to help make it happen. The man doing the calling, the man who told his design team to create a latter day Cobra, was car industry legend and then-Chrysler president ‘Maximum’ Bob Lutz. Together with chairman Lee Iacocca, he saw the project through from clay model to production reality in late 1991.

Photography: Mark Riccioni

But it was Carroll Shelby put out in front of the crowds to demo the prototype as pace car for the Indy 500 that year, and Shelby whose fingerprints are all over the Viper. If not to quite the same extent as the Cobra. You see, while the Viper was Lutz’s brainchild brought to life by a small team within a large corporation, the Cobra was Shelby’s idea from start to finish.

It started life as a British sports car, the AC Ace, which arrived in 1953 but was saddled with pre-war straight six engines that weren’t fit for purpose. By 1961 a tie-up with Ford in America was arranged by Carroll Shelby and gave AC access to the Windsor V8. The AC Cobra was born as a British sports car. But Shelby instantly saw its racing potential. In the US the AC name wasn’t used – there it’s the Shelby Cobra.

His first attempt, using a 6.4-litre Ford FE V8 was nicknamed ‘The Turd’ by driver Ken Miles. It was fast down the straights, but virtually undriveable. The chassis was modified, the Mark III arriving in 1965, but too late to be eligible for homologation that year. 56 race cars were produced, but most were detuned for road use. They remained fearsomely potent, the 427cu in engine tuned to 485bhp and good for 185mph. It weighed just 1,068kg. But with the GT40 project looming large, the Cobra’s era was over by 1967.

Genuine originals became instant collectors’ items, but the shape was so iconic that production was licensed out and continued. Boy is it hard to work out what went on, with who and where. Everyone wanted a piece of the action, no-one wanted to pay, lookalikes popped up, chaos reigned. Today, Superformance build official Shelby Cobras under licence, and they carry the same CSX chassis numbers as the originals. Think of this as the tenth generation and you’re not far off.

Officially imported into the UK (in right hand drive no less, for £195,000) by Clive Sutton, it’s new build but period correct and the vibe is spot on. I’ve driven a 427 and this has the same mighty charisma and V8 thunder. The same wobbly, flawed dynamics, too. In place of the old big block FE V8, there’s Ford’s Coyote 5.0-litre. Don’t worry, with 460bhp and 420lb ft, it produces pretty much the same power as a semi-competition 427, and – more importantly – has the noise and attitude to go with it.

What is it about these American V8s and their ability to tap straight into your primal cortex? The noise is Neolithic, a Jurassic rumble as much felt as heard. I’m a lugging neanderthal as soon as the blub-blub-blub gets going, I find it irresistible. So does everyone around – its effect on people is like the opening bars of ‘I Wanna Be Like You’ on Baloo in The Jungle Book. It’s mellow at low revs, will pull away in fifth, but changes character into a snarling race motor at the top end.

Alongside it Mark Riccioni’s Viper is smooth, almost cultured. The exhaust pulses from that V10 are softer, it splutters into life rather than snarls, but if there’s any doubt about its potential, consider the way the exhausts blow stones across a car park when you tweak the throttle. That’s an 8.0-litre V10 throbbing away up front. Commonly thought to be taken from a RAM 2500 truck, it was more developed than that. Lamborghini (then owned by Chrysler) lent a hand with the engine, which saw power climb from 300 to 400bhp. Torque stood at 465lb ft. The damn motor weighed over 320kg though. The whole car, 1,490kg. Apparently it was good for 0-60mph in 4.2secs and 165mph all told. A test for the toupee tape.

The engines dominate the experience in both cars. Each will thud away happily from tickover and the Viper in particular is geared for interplanetary exploration. Sixth pulls about 1,400rpm at 70mph. But while the Cobra has this race demeanour at high revs, the Viper’s engine is lazier. It struggles to overcome its own inertia. It goes hard, but is never urgent, doesn’t rev high, never begs to be thrashed. You can tell it wasn’t intended to be a sports car engine.

It’s the Cobra that has the more addictive engine… and the cleaner, more precise and satisfying gearbox too. It slots cleanly and quickly with no threat of missed shifts, whereas the Viper makes it all too easy to go from fourth into reverse instead of fifth. It just makes you a bit nervous of rushing the lever around. And it’s not that satisfying when you do.

And that kind of sums up the Viper driving experience. It’s a bit woolly around the edges, doesn’t have the sharpness, response and reaction you expect. It’s more of a GT in execution, the input responses are quite soft, almost delayed, but although there’s not much feel, you can detect an edge to the tyres and that’s when your Spidey-senses start to tingle. “Back off now”, they tell you, “before it goes all kinds of wrong.” I once span a Viper GTS (on an airfield, thank god) and remember to this day how clumsy it felt, how uncomfortable and unsophisticated. And just how quickly it had got away from me.

Both are pretty ramshackle and rudimentary to drive. The Cobra didn’t live a long enough motorsport life to be developed further, the Viper is the concept car that made it far enough and no further. The Cobra is small and keen enough to encourage exploitation, but there’s something about the Viper that chills your spine good and early. Neither rides well, the Cobra trembles and jitters worse than a period Morgan, the Viper rounds the edges off better but feels heavy and dull.

The Cobra is easily the better of the two, the more joyous and addictive

It’s the Cobra that convinces more as a static object. It doesn’t try to pretend it’s something it’s not. There’s no roof, just a tonneau, there’s no equipment, but the dials and switches are lovely; the boot is big and those side flaps that flank the windscreen are way more effective than you expect at steering air away. From a distance the Viper flatters to deceive. It looks like a proper car. Then the hilarity descends. The roof and side screens are sub-Caterham, sub-umbrella. There’s no exterior door handles. The seatbelts are mounted on the door for some bizarre reason, the plastics are beyond comedy: badly moulded and nasty to touch, the worst the 80s had to offer.

You can spot the commonalities between the two: the same massively wide transmission tunnel that puts driver and passenger in different postcodes, as if Dodge put the propshaft in the Channel Tunnel. Massively offset pedals. Curious seats and driving position. Bum on back axle.

The Cobra is easily the better of the two, the more joyous and addictive. It might be primitive but the guts and fury make it a force of nature. But just look at the Viper. The experience of being around it is enough to rock you back on your heels. It’s got such impact, it’s so ridiculously, outlandishly daft. The perfection of those three-spoke alloys, the side pipes, the thrusting bonnet, the sheer width. It’s a fantasy. A rip-roaring reimagining of the Cobra. They were $50k new, and survived through until 2017. There were coupes and even a second generation from 2003. But if you’re going to have one, it’s got to be this, the original, most bonkers and therefore best. Consider yourself warned.