How the famed Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe almost didn’t win
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The Cobra roadster was fast, but would it be fast enough for Europe’s high-speed tracks? Likely not.
By Peter Brock
Sep 27, 2025 |
Shelby,
Cobra,
Le Mans | Posted in
Features | From the May 2020 issue |
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The Shelby Daytona Coupe represented an unknown quantity at the start of Le Mans in 1964. John Ohlsen, shown peering around the volunteer wearing the white T-shirt, believed in the car.
On a hot June afternoon in 1964, just days before the start of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, only one of Carroll Shelby’s two entries for the world’s most important and prestigious race was on site and ready to run. All Shelby knew was that his new, completely untested, engineless second entry, having had its body just completed in Modena, was somewhere on the road being flat-bedded up from Italy.
Shelby’s impatience was simmering. The always difficult border crossing with fractious French customs could take hours or even days, time that simply wasn’t available. Knowing how much work remained to complete this second entry, his frustration with the situation was evident.
Shelby’s reputation and credibility with sponsors was tenuous. After the fast-talking Texan’s team had miraculously won the GT class at the 12 Hours of Sebring just weeks previously, Henry Ford II had taken a big gamble in backing him with his still highly controversial new design called the Daytona Cobra.
The radically shaped, Ford V8-powered GT had easily defeated Ferrari’s best, convincing the Deuce there was some real potential in their alliance. Now Shelby’s entire future with Ford was dependent upon his team’s success in a grueling, twice-around-the-clock event where few Americans had ever dared to compete. Competition from the impressive works teams of Jaguar, Aston Martin, Ferrari, AC and even Ford itself, with three of its brand-new GT40s, could not have been more menacing.
When the semi-completed second Daytona finally arrived from Italy, it was covered in dust and still smelling of fresh paint. Just weeks earlier, its bare twin-tube chassis had been completed at AC Cars in England and then flown to Shelby’s shop in California, where a dummy engine and transmission were installed so the headers and exhaust system could be fabricated.
Radiator, plumbing and electrics were then fitted, while a couple of structural tubes were welded in to support the new body. The mock-up engine and trans were removed, and the chassis was again flown halfway across the world to Rome so it could be trucked up to a tiny backstreet body shop in Modena called Carrozzeria Grand Sport.
The first Cobra Daytona Coupe was built in Shelby’s California shop, and, with designer Peter Brock present during the build, remained perfectly true to the original design. (Pictured are exact replicas.) The follow-up Cobra Daytona Coupes-there would be six in all-were built by Carrozzeria Grand Sport. The Italian crew reconfigured the roofline and made a few other adjustments as they followed their own muses. Photography Credit: Peter Brock
Inside, a team of Modenese fabricators had been anxiously awaiting the chassis. Their objective was to create a copy of the first Daytona’s body, which had been built to my dimensions in Shelby’s shop in California. However, the Modenese wouldn’t have the luxury of copying off our only Daytona, as it was being prepped in France for Le Mans’ annual Test Days and would then be sent to Belgium for the race at Spa.
All they had were my drawings and a few photographs, but there was one other problem: The Modenese workmen had just discovered that my quarter-scale drawings for the Daytona’s body were in inches. The Italians worked in millimeters!
Even had I been there, I would have had no fast, practical method to convert the drawings or dimensions. Unfazed by this seemingly irreconcilable setback, the Italians simply looked at my drawings and the photos and began recreating the form by eye! I didn’t know it at the time, but this was actually the normal method of building racing car bodies in Modena, so my drawings were simply a visual guide.
But, as they studied the Daytona’s unfamiliar lines, there was just one other “minor problem”: It looked unlike anything they’d ever built. They actually thought I’d made an error. So, with the best of intentions, they simply recontoured the roofline to resemble the locally built Ferraris and then “improved” my nose and headlight details to better suit their Modenese aesthetic sensibilities.
Now, in Le Mans, with just hours remaining, the responsibility of putting this entire Daytona puzzle on the starting grid lay with John Ohlsen, Shelby’s young New Zealand crew chief.
Incredibly, Ohlsen was the only mechanic on Shelby’s team of veterans who completely understood the Daytona’s unique structure. That’s because he, almost singlehandedly, had built much of my first Daytona in California under the highly skeptical oversight of Shelby’s unquestioned team leader and chief engineering fabricator, Phil Remington.
At Shelby’s request, I originally designed the Daytona in secret, and its radical form adhered to none of the accepted dogma of racing car design. That proved to be a major problem. Its dramatically chopped tail and unfamiliar roofline were considered so counterintuitive and aesthetically unappealing that Remington and several on his crew actually refused to work on the project, believing it would be a waste of time.
Remington assigned the project to our Kiwi “new guy,” John Ohlsen. Amazingly, he dived in and started building.
Soon, a couple more of Remington’s select crew joined on their own after hours and helped build that first Daytona.