[Historybuff]

I don't know how common it was in Cobras but in researching other
race cars I have come across cases where a team would be testing a car and have another complete car hidden in the trailer. If they smashed the car they were testing they would act like they were repairing it in their garage but actually roll out the identical car. Also I heard about the finessing the serial numbers as far as getting a car from country to country. If you had a plate for a car where the taxes were paid, it was sometimes easier to switch your car to those plates than to have to pay duties on bringing a car in where the fees hadn't been paid. I heard one guy--Hans Tanner--was infamous for driving a Ferrari through a tunnel under the alps and then stopping half way at an emergency stop to switch the id. plates on a car just for that reason.

Of course it confuses racing fans decades later when they start to ask questions like "How come these numbers are so similar?" or "how come there's two cars with this chassis number?"

I had my own registration issue when I bought a Mercedes 300SL in Toronto from a guy who had bought two of them when they were new. He gave me the wrong title. When i got to the Detroit border with Canada, they asked for the car's papers and noticed the registration didn't match the car but then thought "ah, it's close enough" and let me through without confiscating the car. (which I later sold for $2500==back then my policy was "buy low, sell low")