ICONIC AC Roadster

Dustbury put up a post about this car, which tripped the latch on my memory gates, and all this fell out.

Forty years ago, which is longer than most people have been alive, Carol Shelby was the god-king of all red-blooded teenage boys, including me. I didn't really have any idea who he was, all I knew was his name was attached to some of the coolest cars on the planet including the A/C Cobra. The A/C Cobra was created by stuffing a cast iron Ford V-8 into a light weight British sports car. Before Carol got his hands on it, no one had ever heard of it. I mean we knew about British sports cars like MG's, Austin Healy's and Triumph's, but nobody had ever heard of A/C. This might have something to do with the fact that the A/C had an aluminum body which most likely put it's price in the stratosphere, something like a Porsche, which we had also heard of, but never dreamed of being able to afford.

The aluminum body was probably the factor that caused Carol to select the A/C for his Cobra project. Lighter weight you know, and being successful in racing, he had some money he could spend.

I did know one guy at this time who had an A/C Bristol, the original version of the car. It had the most bizarre engine my teenage mind had ever encountered. It was a straight six, which was normal enough, but it had this bizarre arrangement of rocker arms and pushrods that made the head look like it had dual overhead cams.

1958 AC Ace Bristol Engine

A friend of mine was doing some work on this car, and one night after completing some arduous repair we took it out for a spin. The interior had been stripped, including removing the driveshaft tunnel, so the driveshaft was running right through the middle of the passenger compartment, totally exposed. We set the seats in the car (we didn't even bother to bolt them in) and took off, the driveshaft spinning merrily away, just inches from our ignorant butts. For some reason I was driving, and we didn't just go around the block, we went across town. We went around one corner so fast that my seat started to tip over. I managed to hang on to the steering wheel and avoid falling over completely. Actually, that's all I remember about that drive, except that we must have made it home intact. Otherwise I am sure I would have other, legal, memories of the incident.

Enough of that, what about this new car? After watching some of the videos about this car, there are a couple of things I noticed.

• The engine uses pushrods, not overhead cams. Nobody builds pushrod engines for high performance cars anymore, do they?
• They have quite a few black boxes to hold all their electronics, enough that they are taking up a noticeable amount of space.
• The gas cap is beyond silly. Very cool on some planets, I suppose, but silly. I mean, you need a remote control to open the gas cap? These guys have fallen off the end of the dock.
• They have gone considerable trouble to make this car jewelry-like. I suppose when you are going for the big bucks, that's understandable.
• 200 MPH in a roadster? Maybe with a removable hardtop, and compared to modern cars, that windshield looks like a wall.

Update October 2016 replaced missing picture.