Superformance 289 Slab Side Cobra: Norman's Walkaround

Every Cobra tells you when it was built just by looking at its flanks. The early 289 cars run flat, unadorned bodywork from nose to tail — no flares, no bulges, nothing but clean aluminum stretched over a tube frame. Collectors call them "Slab Sides," and they're the purest expression of what Carroll Shelby and AC Cars set out to build in the first place: the smallest, lightest car that could swallow a Ford V8 and still be legal for the street. This one is a Superformance-built continuation of that original recipe, and it happens to be one of BIDR Auctions CEO Norman Serinsky's personal favorites in the current lineup.

Watch: Norman Walks Through the Slab Side

Join BIDR Auctions CEO Norman Serinsky as he highlights some of his favorite features of this Superformance-built 1962 289 Shelby Cobra "Slab Side" — from the flat-flanked bodywork that gives the car its name to the details that separate a true period-correct build from the rest.

Why "Slab Side" Matters

The Cobra story starts in September 1961, when Ford handed Carroll Shelby a pair of small-block V8s and Shelby's team dropped one into an AC Ace chassis in a Santa Fe Springs shop — the whole conversion reportedly took less than eight hours. That first prototype, chassis CSX2000, became the template for the Mark II production run that followed: roughly 528 cars built from early 1963 through the summer of 1965, wearing chassis numbers CSX2001 through CSX2602.

Late in 1962, AC's chief engineer Alan Turner reworked the front end to run rack-and-pinion steering (the rack itself borrowed from the MGB, the column from a VW Beetle) while keeping the Ace's transverse leaf-spring suspension underneath. What he didn't touch was the bodywork — flat, unflared aluminum panels with none of the hips and flares that would later show up on the 427 cars. That flat-sided profile is exactly where the "Slab Side" nickname comes from, and it's the look collectors point to as the definitive early-Cobra silhouette: small, lean, and purposeful, with none of the visual drama that came later.

A Continuation Built the Right Way

This particular car is a modern-built MKII Slab Side from Superformance — the manufacturer building Shelby Cobra continuations under license from Carroll Shelby himself. Superformance's MKII and FIA Slab Side cars use the same Tojeiro-styled round-tube chassis and transverse leaf-spring suspension layout as the originals, rather than a simplified reproduction frame, which is a big part of why they're taken seriously as more than replicas.

Superformance itself has been building continuation Cobras, Daytona Coupes, and GT40s since 1996, manufactured at Hi-Tech Automotive's plant in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, with ownership under Lance Stander's Hillbank Automotive Group since 2005. Cars leave the factory "turnkey-minus" — complete rolling chassis ready for the engine, transmission, and final details the buyer specifies — which is how you end up with a numbers-correct-looking Slab Side sitting on a modern small-block instead of a fifty-plus-year-old original that's too valuable to actually drive.

Watch the video above for Norman's own walk-around, then take a closer look at the listing to see this Slab Side's full build sheet.