5 Most Insane Cars Ever Designed by Carroll Shelby

From the Shelby Cobra to the Dodge Omni GLHS, Carroll not only reshaped the muscle car market, but also influenced the way Americans viewed performance cars over the years. He also designed and built some of the wildest vehicles out there. Here are five of them.

Shelby Cobra Super Snake

Carroll's first production car, the Cobra was based on the British-built AC Ace. A lightweight sports car with a big V8 engine, the Cobra is now one of the most American vehicles ever made and one of the most replicated classics.

Carroll designed and built various iterations of the Cobra, ranging from early small-block cars to race-spec models and even a drag-ready variant called the Dragonsnake. But none are as ridiculous as the Super Snake.

Developed in 1966 as the "Cobra to end all Cobras," the Super Snake was essentially a road-legal Competition Cobra with a supercharged V8 under a massively bulged hood.

Fitted with a pair of Paxton superchargers, the 427-cubic-inch (7.0-liter) V8 generated a whopping 800 horsepower, which made the Super Snake insanely powerful and very difficult to control.

Shelby made only two of them. He kept one for himself and gave the other one to comedian Bill Cosby, who recalled his experience with the Super Snake in the famous "200 MPH" comedy routine.

Frightened by the car's enormous power, Cosby eventually gave it back to Carroll. Legend has it that the person who ended up buying the vehicle drove it off a cliff into the Pacific Ocean.

The surviving Super Snake was auctioned off twice in recent years. In 2021, it changed hands for $5 million.

Shelby Mustang GT500 Super Snake

Introduced in 1967 with an FE-series 428-cubic-inch (7.0-liter) V8, the Shelby GT500 was quite the wild pony at the time. But Carroll decided to take things up a notch and dropped a 427 FE V8 from the Ford GT40 race car in a specially-prepped Fastback that year.

Rated at more than 500 horsepower (some claim the unit was tuned to deliver 650 horses), the GT500 Super Snake was capable of speeds over 150 mph (241 kph).

Carroll himself hit 170 mph (274 kph) in the muscle car, which was on par with what a V12-powered Lamborghini Miura was capable of at the time.

Unfortunately, the Super Snake didn't get as much interest as Shelby had hoped, and the project was halted after the prototype was built. The one-off "concept" is still around and was most recently auctioned off for more than $2 million.

Shelby Daytona Coupe

Born in 1964 out of Carroll's desire to beat Ferrari at Le Mans, the Daytona Coupe was loosely based on the Shelby Cobra. The latter had already become a successful racer at the time, but its open-cockpit layout prevented it from being as fast as the Ferrari 250 GTO on the long Mulsanne Straight.

A more aerodynamic take on Carroll's "small car, big engine" ethos, the Daytona Coupe won the GT class in both the 24 Hours of Sebring and the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1964. The coupe scored five more wins in 1965, clinching the International Championship for GT Manufacturers.

The Daytona also set no fewer than 25 land speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats that year.

Ford GT40

Just like the Daytona Coupe, the Ford GT40 was developed to defeat Ferrari's successful race cars. Born right after Ford failed to purchase Ferrari, the GT40 wasn't built entirely by Shelby, but Carroll was part of the project that brought together Ford Advanced Vehicles, John Wyer Automotive Engineering, and Kar Kraft.

The project was actually handed over to Carroll Shelby in 1964, after a series of disappointing results. Under Shelby's guidance, the GT40 morphed into a competitive car and won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in both 1966 and 1967, achieving Henry Ford II's dream to defeat Ferrari.

Carroll's success was continued by John Wyer, who took the GT40 to two more wins at Le Mans in 1968 and 1969.

Just like the Cobra, the original GT40 is now a highly replicated car, while Superformance still offers a continuation series. Ford revived the design in 2004 and 2016 with the mid-engined GT.

Shelby Lone Star

But Carroll's wildest creation is far from famous. That's mostly because it was created after Shelby's split with Ford and did not spark much interest at the time of its unveiling. Called the Lone Star, after Carroll's home state, this intriguing sports car was developed as a successor to the iconic Cobra.

Built on a modified Ford GT40 chassis and fitted with a V8 engine behind the seats, the car was called the Cobra III in internal Shelby documents. However, because Ford had acquired the Cobra name in 1967, Shelby wasn't allowed to use the badge that made him famous. But that wasn't the Lone Star's only problem.

The sports car wasn't properly equipped to meet then-new safety regulations. Shelby was hoping that Congress would pass a bill exempting small manufacturers from some of the new safety standards, but that didn't happen. The new regulations prevented the Lone Star from becoming street-legal, and Shelby abandoned the project.

The sole prototype was then offered for sale in Autoweek with the headline "sex on wheels." The asking price was $15,000, the equivalent of around $131,000 in 2023. The car resurfaced in tip-top condition at Amelia Island in 2018, after a decade-long restoration process.