Carroll Shelby must be resting happily in his grave, knowing his creation just became the most expensive American ever to be sold at an auction. That’s right, the 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe fetched US$42.905 million at Gooding & Christie's Auction.
And guess which car the Cobra Daytona beat. Ferrari's one-off Luce electric hypercar came up short by a little under $3 million at RM Sotheby's, at $40 million. Shelby beat Ferrari … again!
Bearing the model number CSX2300, it was the very first Daytona Coupe Shelby American built – only six were ever completed. The story begins with Carroll Shelby, who had already made a name for himself by taking Ford's V8 and stuffing it into the lightweight British AC Ace to create the Cobra. The Cobra was brutally fast, but there was a problem: at high speeds, its upright roadster body wasn't particularly aerodynamic.
And Shelby had a rather specific problem to solve: Ferrari's 250 GTO. The Italian machine was dominating the GT racing world, and Shelby wanted a weapon capable of taking it on at the sort of speeds where aerodynamics mattered as much as horsepower. Rather than simply bolt more muscle into the Cobra, Shelby American commissioned designer Peter Brock to develop a dramatically more aerodynamic body.
The result was this very car. Brock's design looked almost alien compared to the curvaceous roadsters of the period. The long, low nose, steeply sloping roof and chopped-off rear end weren't there simply to make the car look cool. Although there’s no denying it certainly did.
The shape was engineered to slice through the air at racing speeds while retaining the Cobra's potent V8-powered mechanical package. The lightweight aluminum body came from Carrozzeria Gransport in Modena, Italy, under which sat the mechanical hardware derived from Shelby's Cobra.
Brock's design was an exercise in making an American V8-powered sports car slippery enough to fight the Italians on their own turf. And it bloody worked.
The result was two stage wins at the 1964 FIA GT Championship and securing the 1965 FIA World Manufacturers' Championship, beating the Ferrari Colombo V-12-powered 250 GTO in the process. After winning races at Suzuka and Fuji in 1966, this very Cobra Daytona was reportedly used as a street car in Tokyo until its departure in 1968.
Carroll Shelby bought the vehicle back in 1975 and maintained it till 1998 – making it the only Daytona Coupe he ever personally owned. No doubt that added more heft to CSX2300’s value.
And it didn't merely edge past the previous record, either. It demolished it by more than $20 million. The previous record belonged to a 1935 Duesenberg SSJ, which fetched $22 million at Gooding's Pebble Beach auction in 2018.
CSX2300's sale also says something about how the collector-car market is evolving. For decades, the very top of the market was dominated by European names: Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz, Bugatti, Porsche, Alfa Romeo and the like. American cars certainly had their place, but the really astronomical numbers tended to belong to European racing machines.
Now an American-built racing car has smashed its way into that territory. The lesson isn't necessarily that every old American car is suddenly worth a fortune. It's that the truly irreplaceable ones are becoming increasingly valuable.
If Carroll Shelby were around to see one of his cars sell for 43 million dollars, I'm guessing he'd probably have two questions. Who's buying it – and when can we go racing?
Source: Christie’s
