This 580-HP Superformance Cobra Came From The Shop That Built The World's Fastest Cobra

Most Cobra replicas are built to look fast. This one came out of a shop that went to the desert and proved it. A black Superformance MKIII carrying a Ford Performance Aluminator 52XS V8 is live right now on Bring a Trailer, where bidding had reached $63,000 at the time of writing with the auction set to close Wednesday, August 19. The car was commissioned by its current owner and assembled by Taormina Motorsports of Redwood City, California — the same operation whose founder, Ted Taormina, holds the record for the fastest Cobra roadster on the planet.

That connection is the part worth slowing down for. Taormina ran a Superformance MKIII to 201.1 mph at the Mojave Air and Space Port in 2017, erasing a Cobra speed mark that had stood for roughly half a century. He went back at it and pushed a further-developed car, nicknamed the "Italian Job," to 223.2 mph in Idaho in 2021. A Cobra is a 1962 shape with the aerodynamic sophistication of a shoebox, so getting one past 220 mph is less about horsepower than about making the air behave.

The Aero Is The Giveaway

Read the equipment list on this car and the fingerprints are obvious. Alongside the expected fiberglass bodywork in black, the listing calls out a front valance, a headrest fairing, a rear diffuser, and a custom low-rise windshield. Those are not items you check off a Cobra accessories catalog. A diffuser and a headrest fairing are drag-and-lift solutions, the sort of pieces a shop develops when it has spent real time watching a Cobra get light at triple-digit speeds.

The rest of the exterior stays period-correct in spirit: a single roll hoop, a hood scoop, quick-jack bumperettes, a LeMans-style fuel filler cap, and side-exit exhaust pipes. It reads as a Cobra first and a science project second, which is the trick a lot of modernized replicas fail to pull off. If you want to see how differently that can go, Superformance's own MKIII-R takes the contemporary approach much further, with scalloped fenders, LED headlights, and integrated venting that announce themselves from across a parking lot.

What's Actually Under The Scoop

The Aluminator 52XS is worth clarifying, because the "5.2-liter Ford" shorthand sends most people straight to the flat-plane-crank Voodoo from the Shelby GT350. This isn't that engine. Ford Performance builds the 52XS around a forged steel cross-plane crankshaft, runs 12:1 compression, and rates it at 580 horsepower at 7,800 rpm with 445 lb-ft at 4,500 rpm. It is the most powerful naturally aspirated modular crate engine Ford Performance sells, and it currently lists at $26,500 before anyone touches it with a wrench.

This one has been touched. The build adds a custom air intake, a Moroso oil pan, long-tube headers, and blue ignition coil covers, with the selling dealer quoting the same 580-horsepower figure. Power goes rearward through a six-speed manual and a limited-slip differential. In a car this size, that is a genuinely alarming amount of engine — and unlike a 427 FE, it will happily spin to nearly 8,000 rpm doing it.

The Rest Of The Spec Sheet

The digital odometer reads 537 miles. The interior is tan leather with diamond-pattern stitching carried into the door panels, fitted with low-back buckets, latch-and-link racing harnesses, a lockable glovebox, a dash-mounted rearview mirror, and a heater. A wood-rimmed steering wheel fronts Smiths instrumentation built around a reverse-sweep 180-mph speedometer, joined by a tachometer, oil pressure, coolant temperature, oil temperature, and fuel gauges, plus a Lucas amperage gauge.

Underneath sit four-wheel independent suspension with adjustable coilovers and four-wheel discs clamped by four-piston Wilwood calipers. Seventeen-inch Halibrand-style wheels wear staggered-width Kenda tires, and the car has power steering. It's titled to chassis number SP03743, with a Pennsylvania title describing it as a 1965 Superformance Coupe, and it's selling on dealer consignment with manufacturer's literature and a tonneau cover.

Where This Lands In The Market

If you want to understand the gulf this car is sitting in, run the variants through Hagerty's Valuation Tools. Hagerty maintains separate entries for the 1965 Shelby Cobra 427 by CSX serial block, for the 427 S/C and its completion cars, and — usefully — a standalone listing for the 1965 Superformance Cobra Replica, with past sales logged individually by chassis number. Three tiers of the same silhouette, three completely different financial universes.

At the top, originals are barely in the same conversation. CLASSIC.COM puts the average Shelby Cobra 427 sale at roughly $1.66 million, with a high of $3.3 million recorded in January 2026. Even the well-documented outliers reinforce it: a 1966 427 Super Snake, one of 23, changed hands for $5.5 million at Barrett-Jackson, and the Competition car Jay Leno hosted in his garage carries an estimate near $2.5 million.

The middle tier is Shelby American's own continuation program. CSX4000-series cars trade around the half-million mark — new-built, aluminum-bodied, and carrying a Shelby serial number, but not a 1965 car.

Then there's where this MKIII lives. CLASSIC.COM's broader Shelby Cobra replica category averages $63,623 across nearly a thousand tracked listings, though that pool includes everything from kit-car projects to fully sorted builds. Superformance specifically sits at the stronger end: The Classic Valuer logs 133 sold Superformance Cobras since 2020 with a 76 percent sell-through rate, a median in the high five figures, and a ceiling well into six.

The Math That Matters

Here's the number that makes this listing interesting. Superformance rolling chassis plus drivetrain and installation has historically penciled out near $94,000 for a conventionally powered MKIII. This one uses a $26,500 crate engine, custom aero, Wilwood brakes, and a build by a shop with a land-speed record on its resume. At $63,000 with the auction still running, the bid is comfortably under the cost of the parts, never mind the labor.

Replicas have never been an appreciation play, and nobody should buy one expecting otherwise — the sales records show these cars behaving like well-built driving machines, not like the CSX cars they resemble. But that's rather the point. A real 427 Cobra is a seven-figure asset that its owner drives with a knot in their stomach. This one is a 580-horsepower, 537-mile, 223-mph-adjacent Cobra you could actually use.

The listing has pulled several thousand views and close to 700 watchers, and the comment section is doing what BaT comment sections do. It ends Wednesday, August 19 at 3:09 p.m.