Brock used the same loophole to design a radical new body for the 289 chassis based on a physics paper he had read some 30 years previously. Even Carroll Shelby doubted the savage, chopped rearend would work with his 289-engined chassis, but when the car tested for the first time on February 1, 1964, at Riverside Raceway in SoCal, it smashed the 289's lap record by 3.5 seconds.
After testing, the team had just three weeks to prepare for the Coupe's competitive debut at Daytona, where it led the GT field by five laps until a pit-fire ruined its race. However in less than a month a legend was born, and there was no stopping it after that. The Coupe won its class at Le Mans and would have won the World GT Championship in its debut season, had Ferrari not pulled some strings and made Monza cancel the final round to give him the crown.
It was a hollow victory, and when Ferrari announced he would not run a factory GT team in 1965, everybody knew he had been scared out of the competition by this stunning new creation. Privateer Alan Mann ran the Cobras in 1965 as Ford and Shelby switched their attention to the GT40 development, and he swept the board in the World GT Championship. His driver, Jack Sears, was also partly responsible for the 70-mph speed limit coming to the United Kingdom, after he was clocked at 185 mph on England's main motorway during a test run.
It was an aerodynamic revelation with a drag coefficient of 0.29, which could rival most of today's sportscars, as could its time of 4.4 seconds to 60 mph. But the introduction of the GT40 spelled its competitive end-it was in the Shelby's contract with Ford that they would not compete with the manufacturer's new toy-just another indication of just how worried everyone was about this car.
Only six Daytona Coupes were ever built, and at the end of 1965, Mann sold them in Los Angeles for a few thousand dollars each to avoid a huge tax bill. A few years back, an ex-Shelby Daytona Coupe sold for more than $4 million at auction, and with "regular" factory works Cobras currently selling above $2 million, there is no telling where the record would be set if another of the original Daytonas ever came back up for sale.