Met Ralph at Watkins Glen this past weekend during the SRO GT World Patriots Car Corral. Awesome guy with awesome stories. One of the highlights of our weekend! Safe Travels and God Bless Brother!
I just met Ralph and his son at Watkins Glen International. Awesome guys. This car is over 600,000 miles now! And the car looks even better now than it did in 2013 when this video was made!
since then I had an encounter with a deer and had to get a new body from FFR. That little blue cobra is no longer blue! BUT is still logging miles now that the covid issues have opened up some.
Someone mentioned that there were comments on the video. So I have been replying to them now. Is there a follow-up video - maybe. To make this video I had to allow Jim to ride along and have a camera on me most of the time for about a week. Jim later gave me the raw footage. For about a 30 minute video, he produced, he gave me 6 full "out takes" digital video tapes he used to create the video. In other words a LOT of video was left on the video room floor! At the time I had no idea what the video was for. I was just taking Jim to the FFR event.
How did you guys make to get allowed to produce this i mean it just do not only look like it has the original Body it has and it is not even licensed i know the first csx2000 was even a ac ace Body with a Ford v8 but allowed!
Wow, I've got possibly the most driven Cobra in Australia with 130,000klm on the clock that I've driven from Newell beach to Roma to Sydney. It pales to Ralphs 1,999,760miles. That's 100,000miles (160,000klm) a year for 20 years. I'm not sure how he got that many miles on it. Perhaps a mistake, (199,760mls?) or perhaps he just lives in the car. At any rate, good on you Ralph, it's a shitload of glorious driving, that's what life is all about. Peace Bro.
looks like the miles number got translated wrong. My car was titled and on the road in 1997 - I currently have a bit over a half million miles. That works out to about 26,000 miles per year. For me as I refuse to fly, even my other personal cars were all very high mileage cars. Usually in the range of 40-50,000 miles per year. Add in having to travel to San Francisco frequently to be at the company's offices while I lived and worked out of Maine it did not take long to start building up the miles. for me it's just a enjoyable car to travel in so ... Traveling I go!
I heard some of the original Cobras had 42 Gallon gas-tanks. This would be very advantageous in every way...Do the Factory-Fives have an optional tank that holds this much?
Someone could make a different windshield/top for it since that was notoriously poor in aerodynamics on the Cobra. A seatbelt wouldn't kill you either.
I have full five point harness in the car but rarely use the shoulder harness - the ebrake handle is located to the passenger side of the tranny tunnel so with the shoulder harness on it's almost impossible to get to he ebrake if needed. I never drive with out the basic seat belt! True the AC Car design is NOT aerodynamic!!! That large opening in the front pulls air in and at speeds begins to lift the front end. Not a good feeling! The soft top I used back when the video was made is a basic British style top, it keeps you less wet BUT not dry. Same with the MG, and early Triumph soft tops. I now have a new soft top made by Rod Tops that does a really good job of keeping me dry.
I currently have a bored and stroked 5.0L engine - 347 cu in. On purpose I built it with a 9.5:1 compression - so I could at a later date add a supercharger to the engine at a later date.
I started with a 5.0L stock EFI engine - added a supercharger - wore out that engine then built a 347 engine ( bored and stroked 5.0L) and that is in the car currently. The 347 engine has been in the car for the last few years.
