[snakeeyes]

Colin Comer is a Wisconsin boy and author of several Cobra books. He seems to have owned about half of the Cobras out there at one time or another. He might be able to shed some light on those cars.

I lived in Grafton, WI from 1982-85. I was already a young Cobra fanatic before we moved there but being so close to Elkhart Lake only magnified things. I saw my first Cobra--a silver 427 Street model--blasting down a county road one fine sunny afternoon, and gave chase in my underpowered sedan until the owner tired of being shadowed and cracked open the dual quads on his FE. I'll never forget the sight of that car disappearing down the road. Around that same time I attended the first of many vintage events at Road America and floated around the paddock about three inches off of the ground, in awe at all of the Cobras. Back then, in the pre-FFR, pre-Superformance days, Cobra replicas were actually rarer than real cars, so the "is it real" question wasn't generally the first one out of peoples' mouths--if it got asked at all.

I'm searching my memory banks for the white or red Cobras you mention, Blackbart, but I can't recall them. I still have grainy photos I took from those early vintage races and will have to see if I have any matching your description. It was a different era even for the vintage events; Ferrari GTOs and Daytona Coupes were certainly valuable but hadn't gone into the stratosphere of pricing, and regular folks still brought them out and ran them alongside the more mundane machinery.