Shelby selling 5 new 1963 Cobra Dragonsnakes—for a mil each

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Shelby American is planning to sell five brand-new 1963 Cobra Dragonsnakes for roughly CDN$1 million (US$750,000) each—not cheap, sure, but not bad when you consider one of the handful of originals built sold in January 2022 for about CDN$1.8 million (US$1,375,000).

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We should note, though, that for that money, you’re not going to get a whole lot of creature comforts. These handbuilt reproductions – assembled for Shelby American by Pennsylvania’s Legendary GT Continuation Cars, which it’s worked with before – aim to be rather accurate to the originals, and each of the five will specifically mirror one of the actual Dragonsnake cars that Shelby built in the ’60s.

Pause: you’re likely familiar with the Cobra, the small British-bodied roadster into which ol’ Carroll Shelby stuffed an American Ford V8 back in the early 1960s; the Dragonsnake variant is less well-known. See, whereas the Cobra was intended to be a sports car, Shelby built the Cobra Dragonsnake for straight-line speed, as a drag racer. His California shop only turned out about seven or eight Dragonsnakes, and they generally tended to take home trophies at the strip.

These five new cars, somewhat like those old ones, get ’60s-style brakes and suspension; modern 15-inch wheels in the original style; and aluminum bodies wrapped around an original-style tube-frame chassis. Less authentic are the aluminum radiator and electric cooling fan, but you wouldn’t want to overheat your Dragonsnake’s 364-cubic-inch aluminum V-8, right?

(That mill, by the way, gets topped by a set of Weber carbs, backed by a Tremec five-speed trans, and should turn out about 500 horsepower to move the 2,100-lb car along smartly.)

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The first new Dragonsnake shown off by Shelby wears a fantastic Fuschia Metallic paint job and emulates chassis no. CSX2093, a 289-cube-V8-powered car originally campaigned by Bruce Larson, who was on hand for the car’s unveiling at the 2023 Carlisle Ford Nationals in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Larson raced his Dragonsnake to the top of the NHRA’s Northeast division, before selling it to Ed Hedrick in 1966, who kept that winning streak going and made CSX2093 the most successful drag-racing Cobra ever.

The turnaround on these new Shelby Cobra Dragonsnake reproductions will be a bit longer than the originals’ was, with Shelby suggesting you budget about a year for yours to be built.