Just to straighten out the "Cobra" name - it came to Carroll in a dream so Ford cars that his shop built/modified have the Cobra "mascot" on it so it doesn't matter if it's a Mustang or an AC - it's going to have the Cobra somewhere on the thing. True, the two seat sports car (Shelby Mustangs in the 60's had the rear seats removed, by the way) were called Cobras outright and the Mustangs weren't called Cobras until, someone pointed out, 1993.
The name thing is kind of neat. When DeTomaso came out with his Sports GT car in the late 60's it was called Mangusta (Mongoose) as they are well known cobra killers in real life but alas, not so much in the car world. I'd still like to have a '69 or '70 Mangusta though.
On muscle cars - I suppose any '60 - early 70's high performance car could be called a muscle car though I think the genre name might be reserved for those big engined intermediate body styles like Tempest, Polara, Satellite, Chevelle, Fairlane, Regal or Cutlass. For that matter, the term muscle car could be used on any number of cars starting way back in the late 40's with the Olds 88 in 1949 with the first Rocket V8 (destined for the heavier 98 model) or maybe the Chrysler C300 in 1955. Pony car was the genre of choice for anything that was directly in competition with the Mustang, be it a Barracuda, Challenger, Firebird, Camaro, Cougar or Javelin. I still think you could lump them into the muscle car fold if they were one of the high performance variants of their model line.
Sorry for the long post but I can discuss "classic cars" all day!
Karl
