Quote:
Originally Posted by All-Or-Nothing
Top of the line Mustangs were Cobras, Cobras were snakes, Shelby made the car super. Super plus Snake, Super Snake............well that sounds about right for me.
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Top-of-the-line Mustangs were never "Cobras" until Ford made the decision, independent of Carroll Shelby (who ended their original relationship in 1969), to offer an appearance package on the 1976 Mustang and called is the “Cobra II”. (BTW, there was never a “Cobra I”) This work was outsourced by Ford to another company (ala the Camaro SS to SLP) and it ran through 1978. In 1978, they also introduced a “King Cobra” Mustang which was the first pony to ever wear the 5.0 badge but, again, this had nothing at all to do with Shelby Automobiles.
The “Cobra” name disappeared from Mustangs for many years after that until the name was applied to the 1993 “Cobra” Mustang, produced by Ford's in-house performance division, SVT. The name carried through as the top-of-the-line Mustang offering until 2004.
So you see, the term Mustang Cobra only came to designate the highest performance level for the Mustang in the early ‘90’s, so historically speaking, the “Cobra” name has only been associated with high performance in the Mustang for a relatively short period of time in the 45 years of Mustang production.
When Shelby and Ford reconciled in the early 2000’s, SVT had already engineered the S197 version of the Mustang Cobra but the decision was made, with Carroll Shelby’s blessing, to call that car a Ford Mustang Shelby GT500. True to its origins, the car does not carry the “Cobra” name (no Shelby-modified Mustang ever did), but they did carry over the coiled Cobra badging that had become synonymous with high-performance Mustangs.
Yes, the coiled-Cobra badge did first appear on the 1967 Shelby Mustang, but they were never called Cobra Mustang’s