I went to the Pier show at the Santa Monica pier Saturday and was amazed to see a very cosmetically trashed 427 Cobra SC displayed by Anthony Boosalis of the LaCanda flintridge area. It was part blue and part gold, I guess gold first and blue second with the blue falling off in shards. It had side pipes and the wider rear wheels, big quik-fill cap, aircraft battery, etc. I neglected to write down the serial number but Anthony said it was part of the run of S/C cars made when the cars failed to sell as race cars. I neglected to find out if it has a racing history. I also didn't ask (it's soooo protetarian to ask about money, right? ) the cost but I heard someone walking by say something North of one million. I would say this is a "barn find" only in that it was neglected unrestored for decades but not a barn find in the strict sense if one had to pay probably the highest price yet for an unrestored Cobra. When i was looking for barn finds 30 years ago (not Cobras) the defination was understood to apply to cars where the owner/seller was unaware of current market trends and you could "steal" it from him. Anybody else know any details of who had the car; why it was unrestored for so long, etc. I'd post a picture but don't know how--maybe I can paint a picture if my film turns out good (yeh, still shooting film...)
3047 Pictured on the Pier... http://http://www.clubcobra.com/forums/all-cobra-talk/112589-lasaac-show-santa-monica-pier-9-17-11-a.html
Steve did a wonderful job picking the old paint off the car. Took him years of painstaking work, but well worth the effort to uncover the original gold paint were he could.
Wally, seriously...you have to keep up on this stuff. 3047 is one of two S/Cs that were painted Hertz Gold at the factory. The other one has been "refreshed." This one had the original gold under its prior blue paint. (as well as some nifty vintage bondo). A choice was made to preserve the undercoat of gold. You may decide if it was a good idea.
The growing interest in "barn find" cars is great. It shows an appreciation for a car that has, theoretically, been untouched for some time and is presumably unrestored, since few people go through the trouble and expense of restoring a vehicle only to then let it sit and collect dirt, dust, cobwebs, and who knows what else. I recall this Cobra from back in the early 70's when a friend, Carter Gette of Millbrook, NY owned it. It was still wearing its factory Hertz Gold paint at that time, but it was tired. There were some dents in the car; there were small areas of minor body damage, and the car essentially needed a some repair and a repaint. This it received, with a fresh coat of blue metallic offset with white stripes, applied around 1973. Fast forward to 2010. The blue paint is starting to show its age, and the interest in "unrestored" vehicles has grown exponentially. From which a "what if?" session began, along the lines of, "since the blue paint appears to have been casually applied almost 30 years ago, and can be scraped off with a fingernail in spots, what if we were to remove it the rest of it and return the car back to its original gold finish?" A fine idea, spoiled only by the fact that the gold was pretty well worn when the repaint occurred, and was scuffed further in preparation for paint. Plus, the bondo around the nose had no gold paint on it, and some of the blue paint didn't want to let go of its grip, and had to remain. Which meant that the car took on the appearance of a somewhat neglected barn find even if it really wasn't. Whether a nicely restored car is preferable to a tatty "Barn find" is up to the car's owner. But as for me, I think that when it's time to repaint a car for the third time, stripping off paint job #2 to get back to the original one, after many years, is probably not the direction I will take.
When this car was advertised in Autoweek in 1971, what was the price? Of course then it was just a used car. I recall a restored one in early '70s going for $10,000 so this must have been less. Does anyone have the old ad? Thanx
