This High-Powered Sports Car Never Goes Out of Style

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A transcript, cleaned up by AI and edited by a human staffer, is below.

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Transcript:

It’s the 2025 Woodward Dream Cruise, and we’re in the Snake Pit.

Oh jeez.

All right, I’m sorry. That was really lame.

That’s all right. Actually, I’m here for the bank architecture, but since there are Cobras here, we’ll talk about those. I can do a separate podcast on the architecture another time.

Exactly. So, the 2025 Woodward Avenue Dream Cruise. Excuse any background noise—we’ve got potentially 40,000 classic cars driving up and down the road behind us. If you hear rumbling or screeching tires, that’s probably why.

This is Drawing Conclusions. I’m your idiot host, Craig Cole. This is Jason White, former car designer and professor of design at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.

Allegedly.

Allegedly. So, what are we talking about here, Jason?

Well, the Cobra is a classic design, and that won’t be news to anyone. We’re here along Woodward Avenue, near a bank whose parking lot has turned into a sort of concours for Cobras. We’ve got a wide variety of kits here. I think it’s safe to say there aren’t any original Cobras—these are all likely replicas.

We’ve got a Superformance over here, and then—what’s the name of this one again?

Factory Five.

Right, Factory Five. These are perfect examples of something interesting about the Cobra. There are certain designs that can span multiple eras, even though they’re classics.

If you look at the Superformance, it’s very true to the original. Lots of sidewall in the tires, three-pronged wheel hubs, and the overall execution is very close to what an original Cobra would have been.

Then you come over here, and this one is quite a bit different—much more modern. It has a modern engine, black wheels, and details that clearly came later than the original Cobra era. But somehow, it works. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but it does.

You can personalize and update this car, and it still looks fantastic. Most purists aren’t going to come after you for it.

Exactly.

There are other cars where doing that would look amateurish, but the Cobra seems to embrace it. I’m glad it does, because it’s such an important car in the pantheon of automotive design.

And that comes from its origins. The Cobra is based on the AC Ace, which predates it. It started as a British sports car with its own engine, then later a Bristol straight-six. After some modifications, it was ready for the massive power it would eventually receive as the Shelby Cobra.

What’s also fascinating is the form of the car. You can almost picture the AC craftsmen shaping these fenders by hand on an English wheel. There’s a lot of subtlety in the shape that sometimes gets overshadowed by the car’s beefy proportions.

I’ve always said 80 percent of car design is proportion. The rest is surface detail. But look at how the fender transitions into the body. Look at the way the stripes reflect off the ground and reveal the shape. That kind of transition is handled very well here.

In the wrong hands, this could easily become a hard edge with no flow at all. Someone we spoke to earlier pointed out how these transitions can vary between cars. For example, this transition here—from the barrel into the fender—is soft and subtle. On this one, it’s sharper, almost a crease.

You’d never notice that unless someone pointed it out or you had the cars side by side. That kind of insight usually comes from people who really know these cars. Cobra owners tend to be extremely knowledgeable. I wouldn’t dare quiz them on Cobra history.

But I love how this car can exist across different eras without feeling like it’s betraying the original design.

You can see that in the wheels too. These darker wheels are more modern, while the other setup has more sidewall and a more traditional look. Both work.

And then there are the powertrains. Originally, this was a straight-six when it was just an AC. No Shelby involvement back then.

Later, of course, came Ford V8s—the 289, and eventually the 427. A 289 in a car this small and light sounds borderline terrifying. A big-block even more so.

One of my favorite movies is The Killers from 1964. John Cassavetes plays a race car driver, and he drives a black Cobra at Riverside. It’s a perfect match for his character’s aggressive personality.

Now that I’ve spent the day around Cobras, I’m definitely going to watch that again tonight.

Under the hood today, we’re seeing modern engine swaps too. Some cars still run pushrod Ford V8s, but others are using Ford’s modular engines—the 5.0-liter Coyote, or even the 5.2-liter version. It’s a fantastic engine: smooth, powerful, and happy to rev.

The challenge with those quad-cam engines is their width. Packaging them can be difficult, which is why we often see GM LS or LT engines swapped into other cars—the pushrod design is much more compact.

So a pushrod engine has a single camshaft in the middle of the V, right?

Exactly. One camshaft in the block, lifters, pushrods, and rocker arms to actuate the valves. Overhead-cam engines put the cams in the cylinder heads, driven by a chain system. Each design has its pros and cons.

And there goes one of the Cobras now. Hard to tell what engine that one had just by sound.

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Back to the show.

The Cobra is a beautiful sports car—powerful, yet sophisticated. That sophistication comes from how the forms are handled. Some kits are more subtle than others, but the overall design is timeless.

It’s funny being in this parking lot, because the painted stripes on the pavement act like zebra stripes in design studios. They reveal every transition in the bodywork.

Here’s a great example. On one kit, the transition from the fender to the flare is tight and abrupt. On another, it’s more drawn out and subtle. Neither is wrong—it’s just two different interpretations of the same surface.

If you hadn’t pointed that out, I never would have noticed.

Color plays a role too. Darker colors tend to show these transitions more clearly.

And speaking of subtlety, look at this metallic blue stripe. The way the flake transitions from light to dark as it curves over the body is beautifully done. If I had to pick a favorite Cobra here, this would be it, just because of that stripe.

Jason, thank you so much for walking us through Cobra design. Always a pleasure working with you, and thanks to everyone for watching.

And if you want more design deep dives, Jason and I also dissected the Studebaker Avanti—another iconic car that gets one critical thing right. Click the on-screen link to check that out.