Ford Falcon Cobra

The paint process is the detail everyone repeats, and it is true: the cars were sprayed Bold Blue first, then the centre sections were masked off and the rest was painted Sno White over the top, with Olympic Blue accent stripes separating the two. So a white car with blue stripes is, underneath, a blue car. Cobra decals went on each front guard and a name decal on the tail, front and rear spoilers were fitted, and the dash got the numbered plaque. The intent was openly a Shelby Mustang, and there was no Shelby involvement whatsoever. Ford had licensed the Cobra name in the 1960s and had parted company with Carroll Shelby in 1970, and Edsel Ford II simply used the family's own name for the family's own car. Ford Australia's design department, by the account in the Cobra register, was not enthusiastic about being asked to do it. The one functional piece of styling is the Option 97 bonnet scoop, rear-facing and open, which exists because a race engine needed the air and not because anybody drew it for effect.

The Cobra commemorates a race it never ran. On 2 October 1977 Allan Moffat and Jacky Ickx won the Hardie-Ferodo 1000 in a Ford XC Falcon 500 GS hardtop, 163 laps, with Colin Bond and Alan Hamilton brought home alongside in formation. Bond had caught Moffat and briefly led into the final corner before dropping back in behind, and the argument over the prize money ran for eight years before it was settled in 1985. Moffat set the fastest lap at 2:26.4, though pole went to Peter Brock in the new Holden LX Torana A9X at 2:24.1, which was the shape of things to come. Moffat took the Australian Touring Car Championship that year in the same car. Option 97 exists to homologate what the race cars had already been running since September 1977, so the road cars followed the racers rather than the other way round. It did not save the programme. At Bathurst in 1978 the two Cobra-liveried team cars were the 1977 winners repainted, and both retired, Bond and Fred Gibson with engine failure, Moffat and Ickx with brakes damaged after a pit fire. Brock and Jim Richards won in an A9X.

In Australia the blue-striped white hardtop is shorthand for the last good year, the point where Ford stopped building cars like this and everyone knew it. Outside Australia almost nobody has heard of it, to the extent that Hagerty ran a piece calling it the Cobra you have never heard of, and the roughly one dozen cars that have reached the United States are treated there as curiosities rather than blue-chip muscle. The shape is famous abroad, which confuses people constantly. The black Interceptor from Mad Max is an XB GT hardtop, not a Cobra and not an XC, and the two cars share a body but not a nose, a badge or a year. What the Cobra has instead is a paper trail nobody else in Australian muscle can match. Ross Vasse and Josh Delany's Ford-licensed register, published in late 2024, gives all 400 cars half a page each from the factory build records, down to the selling dealer and the period classified ads. There are two Falcon Cobra clubs, scale models of both the Option 97 road car and the 1978 Bathurst racers, and a 25th anniversary gathering that pulled more than 50 of the 400 into one place.

Rust is the whole story and the hardtop is worse at it than the sedan. Look at the rear quarters, the panel between the rear screen and the boot aperture, the rear pillars, the sills, the door bottoms and the front guard mounting points, and understand that a vinyl roof hides the base of the rear pillars rather than protecting them. Enough XC hardtops rusted out cheaply in the 1980s that the survivors are the ones somebody thought were worth saving, and plenty of those were saved with filler and patch panels twenty or thirty years ago and are coming back through. The doors are long and heavy and drop on their hinges, which is a known repair with kits available rather than a problem. Mechanically the Cleveland has two habits worth knowing. Ford gave it two main oil galleries where the Windsor has three and fed the cam bearings before the mains, which underfeeds the valve guides on a hard-worked engine. And there is a coolant restrictor plate that looks like it is obstructing flow, so people remove it, and then the engine overheats and cracks a head.