[Harpoon PV2]

What a coincidence, I was just reading about the so called, 1965 championship year, and the Daytona Coupe's. As you know, Ford took the international Cobra program away from Shelby, by promoting him to the GT40 program, and banning him from all the FIA races except for La Mans. They then contracted with an English man named Alan Mann. His job was not to win the FIA Championnat du Monde des Constructeurs, since that series had ended 6 months before the first tube was cut for CSX2000, though Ford and Shelby would claim the Cobra won it! Mann was to win the Class III, which he did. His order to the drivers was clear, if a Porsche 2 liter 904 wants to race, let it go, their not in our class.

20 years later, in an interview with F. Wilson McComb, for his book AC (Shelby) Cobra, Mann stated, "at the end of the season the cars came back from Sicily in pretty rough shape, as you can imagine. I must have had them at my place for fully three months while I wrote letters to the States asking what I was do with them, and I very nearly had to scrap the lot to avoid paying Customs duty on them. But nobody cared. Ford Division didn't want them, Shelby didn't want them, they were just last year's, Junk."