Original Shelby Cobra sells for record amount at auction

Check out this ridiculously awesome $18million Shelby Cobra.

FEAST your eyes on this beauty! What you see before you is the very first Shelby Cobra, and it just sold at Auction for US$13.75million (A$18million).

Let that price sink in for a little bit. Roll it around in your mouth and image what A$18million looks like. Hell, you could land at least a pair of Sydney’s ridiculously priced apartments for that kind of money!

The Monterey Car Week auctions are some of the most expensive in the world, regularly setting sales records.

The final price of this 1962 Shelby 260 Cobra, known as the CSX 2000, makes it the most expensive American-built car ever sold.

The former record holder was a 1968 Ford GT40 which went for the relative bargain amount of US$11million (A$14.38million) in 2012.

There is more information on the CSX 2000 at auction house RM Sotheby’s website , but it is most notable for being the very first Shelby Cobra.

It arrived in the US as an engine-less shell in February 1962, before Carroll Shelby and Dean Moon plonked a 260-cubic-inch V8 engine and Ford four-speed gearbox under its British skin.

Once it was put together, Moon and Shelby decided it was time for an inaugural test… after a few drinks.

“We got drunk and drove it around—an impromptu road course we had set up between the oil derricks,” Moon explains.

“When it didn’t break, even after all that rough treatment, well, then we knew we had a good car.”

The CSX 2000 was enough for Shelby to convince Ford to give him the capital he needed to produce the first batch of Cobras.

New, the car would sprint to 100km/h in 4.2-seconds, which is an impressive figure even by modern standards. In 1962, it would have been mind-altering.

The car lived its life initially at the Shelby family driving school, before an extended period attending promotional and historic events.