[Ron Daveley]

Raw Cobra: I just found out the answer to your questions. Who else but Jimmy Price would drive the coupe at speed on a dirt road? (February calendar shot) If he bends, it, there are others in production at his plant. The White-knuckled passenger is Mike Stenhouse. The photographer was either Pete or Gayle Brock. Mike reports that the car was stable on the dirt road at speeds up to 100 mph. This is a fantastic car. As reported elsewhere in Club Cobra, it was timed at 206 mph. That is 19 mph higher than the speed recorded at Bonneville by the original Daytona Coupe.


Pete Brock, the designer of the original Daytona Coupe, only agreed to do the design of this car, if he could select the chassis designer. Pete got Bob Negstad to do the chasis and suspension design. Bob was the designer of the original GT40 and 427 cobra chassis when he worked for Ford. He came up with a space frame design with incredible torsional rigidity. The torsional stiffness is 6,000 lb-ft per degree! Both Pete and Bob agreed that the new coupe is the car they would have loved to design in the 60's, but could not for various reasons. The car in the February picture had a Roush 402 ci engine developing 500 hp on the dyno. Performance estimates are 0 - 100 in 8.2 sec and the quarter mile in 11.9. All this in a car with air conditioning, roll-up windows, and gets 21.8 mpg at 80 mph!

Ron