Shelby Cobra Fifty Years

By Colin Comer

Available from:
Motorbooks, Minneapolis
www.motorbooks.com

Hard cover, 256 pages, $40

Reviewed by Larry Edsall
Zoom an e-mail to Larry

If you thought Colin Comer's amazingly Complete Book of Shelby Automobiles was, indeed, amazing and complete, you were only partially correct. It was amazing, as we noted in our review. But it turns out it wasn't quite complete, because now Comer and Motorbooks are back with what amounts to a 256-page, large-format companion to Complete: Shelby Cobra Fifty Years.

In the Preface, Comer notes that his newest book is sort of a collection of what Shelby high school yearbooks might have been, had the original Cobra been celebrated in such annual volumes.

Indeed, like going to your high school reunion, Fifty Years is a nostalgic trip back in time, to be reunited with the car not only the people who created it, but some of those who were among the first to own the British roadster into which Carroll Shelby stuffed a powerful Ford V8 engine.

Of course, Shelby's in there. So are Phil Remington and Pete Brock. But also Ed Hugus, whose sports car dealership in Pittsburgh not only sold the first production Cobra, but finished putting it together, and Carol Connors, who not only wrote the song Hey Little Cobra, but also the song Gonna Fly Now, which decades later would become the theme to the Rocky movie.

And speaking of movies, on page 65 there's a photo of kid helping push a Cobra racer into its position at a race track. The kid -- George Lucas -- went on to some success in motion pictures.

While Comer's text provides a road course through the book, it is such photos and their captions that have you lingering longingly while at the same time you're eagerly turning pages.