The Day a Cobra went completely unnoticed

By Stuart Johnston

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to drive a Cobra? A rumbling, snorting, rough-and-ready  V8 machine that’s threatening to spit you into the scenery as soon as you hit the start-up button? Well, let me tell you about my first experience in one of these beasts…..

I remember almost every detail about  the first time I drove a Cobra in anger. Okay, not a real one, because there were only just over 1 000 of those built, but a very good replica, imported from America.  Actually, you aren’t really supposed to call Cobra replicas “Cobras”, but everybody does, and in South Africa, certain replicas are actually permitted to use the Cobra nameplate. But I digress.

This one I was driving was way, way back in 1985 or so. It was in the bad old Pretoria of those days, where men were likely to drive around in very short shorts and long socks, and women stayed home to make their own dresses and had competitions to see who could make the sweetest lemon meringue pies.

I was working as a young motoring editor on Pretoria News, but because I’d already written a well-circulated story on the very first Cobra replica to be seen in South Africa (it was in a Ford dealership’s display window), this dude from Johannesburg  called me up and insisted I spend time with his car, which he’d just imported from America. He gave it to me for a whole week, the crazy fool!

This car was proper! It was dark blue with white stripes, just like the ones that Carroll Shelby had in his race team.  It had the right Halibrand-type wheels like Shelby’s original Cobras from the 1960s, and it had a genuine 7.0-litre Ford V8 side-oiler engine, fitted with not one, but two slurping, guzzling, Holley four-barrel carburettors. To get the tank full, you had better make sure you switched the engine off at the fuel station, otherwise the tank would never fill up!

Now, it just so happened that I had a lifelong friend who was building up his own Cobra replica from a kit he’d bought from a company called, appropriately enough, Kit Car Centre. He had been having all sorts of problems with the bodywork details, and the suspension, which had bump-steer deluxe, a characteristic that meant as soon as you climbed on the brakes, the nose dipped and the front wheels kicked out like the way Donald Duck walks.

Bump steer means bad braking, amongst other things, which means the suspension needed re-jigging. Also, my friend wanted to see what the correct gauges looked like; the roll bar, the gear-lever with its reverse gate, all that stuff.

I sneaked away from the news-room  in down-town Pretoria at about 10 am on a Friday, picked up another racing-mad friend from the office around the corner, and headed out to an industrial suburb near Silverton, where Fords are built today.

On the way there, in those bad old days before cops had the budget for speed cameras, I remember getting this beast into a drift at around two hundred and plenty,  my knuckles whitening and my mouth going dry, before I managed to dial in just the right amount of counter-steering to that wheel.  I gave a death’s head grin, then. My passenger? He was just giggling.

The guy who was building his own Cobra took one look at the car and kicked my office-neighbour out of the passenger seat, because he wanted to get a feel for what his own  baby was going to be like, a few months down the line. So there  we went snorting and screeching around the back suburbs of Pretoria East, making like kids who were bunking school.

We were stopped at a traffic  light at a main intersection , heading back to my buddy’s workshop,  when I heard this screeching sound from somewhere behind me. I glanced in the Cobra’s rear view mirror, mounted  on top of the dashboard in classic fashion, and I detected what looked like an original Mini skidding towards the priceless rear end of  this Cobra, clearly way out of control!

Luckily I had the Cobra in gear and the clutch in, so I simply popped the clutch and wrestled the beast on the gravel verge, just before the intersection. It was just a case of “Whaaarp” on the accelerator, and I had parked it!

The screeching Mini shot past us at an angle not designed to keep it on the road. With smoke spewing from its tiny 10-inch diameter tyres, it slammed into the traffic light pole and rolled over onto its roof.

Just then,  I heard a another big skid from behind me, and in the mirror was this Datsun SSS, smoking to a stop, luckily a short distance behind the Cobra. Then  these two humongous brekers  emerged from the Datsun. They were big enough to make Mike Tyson seem like a midget, and Mike was friendly compared to these two manne.

Funnily enough, I had time to see two very glum-looking fat women in the rear seat of the SSS. They were sitting tight in the Datsun, and they didn’t look as if they had won any pie-making contest on that particular day.

I gazed out the windscreen towards the stricken Mini, still on its roof,  like an insect that has been flipped onto its back with its legs whirring away  in a futile search for traction. Then the doors of the Mini scraped open and from either side these two “okes” emerged, both of them dressed in  nothing more than their underpants!

Everything became clear to me and my Cobra buddy at that moment. The boys in the Datsun had somehow discovered that Lemon Meringue hadn’t been the only thing on the menu back home in Pretoria East that day. And we’d seen enough B-grade movies with similar themes to know what was going to happen next.

Time to leave, so with another quick Whaaarrrp on the throttle, we departed in a haze of rubber smoke. That’s probably the only time in that part of Pretoria, in the three decades since,  that a  full-blown 7.0- litre Cobra in full snarl,  leaving black stripes on the road, has failed to draw any attention whatsoever!

Looking back on that slice of Pretoria life, I often wonder if the four okes and the two chicks had  taken time to appreciate the American Racing colour scheme of that car, the dual white stripes, the Halibrands, and the unsilenced side-winder exhaust pipes.

Probably not.