Just a cars guy: AC Cobra

above is the one Carroll had the guys in the shop make for himself, and a lot of info just came out about it in an article on Hemmings last week.

"It was a car builder’s tribute to himself, so it must have been a helluva car, equivalent to, say, William Colt making a Colt revolver especially for himself.
Of note, CSX3015 wasn’t the only Twin Paxton Shelby built. While he still owned his car, after running into comedian Bill Cosby at a supermarket in Playa del Rey, California, near his condominium, Shelby chided Cosby for preferring Ferraris. Cosby reportedly retorted, “Well, you build a Cobra that will go 200 MPH and I’ll buy one.” So Shelby drove back to his factory at LAX airport and ordered another Super Snake built.
That car, CSX 3303, was only in Bill Cosby’s hands briefly. Reportedly, it scared him to death. He even recorded an album entitled “Bill Cosby at 200 MPH,” making light of the experience. http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2013/09/25/incredible-barn-finds-der-snakemeisters-own/ and it's really interesting to read the comments to that post in my opinion

Such as Carroll used to be a part of a bunch of rich car enthusiasts called the Conquistadores Visatores who would run top speed from the California Nevada border to Elko Nevada, and when on one run the superchargers broke, so Shelby abandoned the car (he had many more) and it would up being bought by a songwriter, Jimmy Webb who like many others, didn't pay the IRS what they wanted, hid the car, and it eventually wound up being found in a shop after 17 years, http://www.wurthitdesigns.com/cobrastory.htm getting bought by an Arizonian car restorer/collector/rare car seller who made it the talk of the internet by getting the Barrett Jackson machine pushing it's publicity in 2007 at the height of the car auction craze http://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2007/01/carroll-shelbys-personal-cobra-sells.html

I posted about it when I first started this blog (and proves that there is cool stuff waayyy back in the archives if you ever look through them) http://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2006/11/carroll-shelby-once-had-special-ac.html

of course, the question of what happened to Cosby's car...That car went to S and C Motors in San Francisco, who sold it to their customer, Tony Maxey who had a stuck throttle and plunged into lake Berryessa. The car was rebuilt by Brian Angliss in the U.K., a man who was Shelby’s nemesis through his founding of CP Autokraft, a company that made Cobra replicas. (Though one Cobra expert who, for a time had the wreck before it went to the UK, said, “When I had it, it wasn’t nothing but a stack of tubing.”)

In the U.K., the owner of the car at the time also found its original engine, which fortuitously had been sold to the builder of a hot rod in the U.K. He had to buy the hot rod to get the engine so that made the rebuild a little bit more genuine – new frame, old chassis i.d. plate, new body and old engine.