When multi-million pound classics get mistaken for kit cars
Can the average person spot an original from a replica, asks Prior
In a car park sits the oldest Porsche in the UK, just the 32nd ever made, worth the best part of £2.7 million. It’s a creamy yellow 356, from 1950, back when Porsches were still made in Gmünd, Austria.
It has a brilliantly detailed history, has never been restored, would make a terrific bookend to a billionaire’s expansive Porsche collection and could easily be entered into those concours events where they value ultimate originality.
No question, it’s one of the most important cars in the history of the world’s greatest sports car maker. “That’s a nice car,” a dog walker says as she passes by. “Did you build it yourself?”
Ouch. Imagine. This car’s custodian is very gracious about the enquiry, and perhaps it’s an understandable one: there are many 356 replicas around, easily based on Volkswagen Beetles, because the 356 itself used many Beetle parts.
And besides, it’s a graceful shape, so you can see why people would want one. But given that more than 75,000 356s were made, there are probably more originals than there are replicas.
Now imagine being the owner of an original Ford GT40 or AC/Shelby Cobra. Original ones are vastly outnumbered by those that aren’t the real thing, whether they’re ‘faithful’ reproductions or not.
Particularly when it comes to Cobras. This isn’t a new phenomenon: there are so, so very many Cobras that aren’t Cobras in the world, self-built or otherwise. Have been for decades.
When I was a lad, I had a classic car magazine that included a drive feature of an original 427 Cobra, in which the writer records a bloke from some nearby scaffolding shouting an enquiry about whether “it has a Jag engine”, having assumed the exquisite aluminium-bodied car wasn’t the real deal.
It’s against this backdrop, plus ongoing acrimony with Shelby in the US – which makes cars actually badged as Cobras, having licensed the name from Ford – that AC Cars, as featured in news and first drives, has decided it’s time to get out of that game of making Cobras, even though they’re actually Cobras and are shaped like Cobras.
In the form of the Ace Classic and Ace Bristol Classic, plus the exciting and promising new Cobra GT Roadster, the company has decided it’s time to do something different.
It’s possible for companies to fight a corner, of course. Caterham once forced Westfield to change the shape of its Seven replica, JLR even sued a Swedish individual who built a Jaguar C-Type replica in his garage (the Magnussons won on appeal, but the court recognised the design’s copyright in cases where people were seeking commercial gain from it), Moke is frequently tied up in it and woe betide you if you make a fake Mercedes-Benz 300 SL, given that those have been sent to the crusher before.
AC has concluded that if you’re fed up with people joining you, you should instead beat them. The Ace is a lovely and distinctive shape and the Cobra GT Roadster wilfully moves the game forward, both from an engineering and a design perspective.
“It had to be visually different,” AC engineering chief Jon Peeke-Vout told me at the Bognor Regis factory last week. “It’s a modern car but it’s got the DNA of an AC,” company chairman Alan Lubinsky said down the phone later.
It’s a novel idea and not unlike that of Ford, which, to my knowledge, never really bothered itself about the dozens of different GT40-lookalike manufacturers that have sprung up over the years.
Instead, it created a new GT, and then another one, and then took it racing, looking ahead, rather than backwards. As a template for where to take a legend, that’s not a bad one to follow.