AC Cars announces nine new 1962 Cobras

British marque AC Cars will produce nine examples of its aluminium-bodied 1962 AC Cobra, using original tooling, techniques and materials in a bid to create exact reproductions of the firm’s very first Cobra.

And you can’t really blame the firm, which has been operating in some form since 1901, since just three weeks ago the very first 1962 AC Cobra sold at auction for a whopping US$13.75 million (A$17.9m) to become the highest-ever sale price of a production car at a US-based auction.

Dubbed the AC Cobra Mk1 260 Legacy Edition, the nine new examples will carry a price tag of £500,000 ($870,170).

Like the original car, the Legacy Edition Cobras will be powered by a 260-cubic-inch V8 engine which the current owner of AC Cars, Alan Lubinsky, described as quite difficult to source. The twin-tube chassis, with its transverse-leaf independent front suspension and live rear axle will also be hand-fabricated at the same factory, AC Heritage located within Brooklands Museum at Weybridge in England.

They’ll be available in two colours; the original factory blue of the recent record-setting example, as well as a yellow variant. The story behind the latter option is when the first example was shipped to America for marketing purposes, after a time it was repainted yellow to trick journos and potential customers into thinking more than one example had been produced.

The factory is owned and operated by dealer and AC enthusiast Steve Gray who expects to build the Legacy Editions in batches of three and hopes to have the first run delivered to owners by the middle of 2017.

Now, if you think about it, if you purchased one of the nine modern examples and left it sitting in a paddock through a few Australian summers to fast-track the patina of a 54-year-old car, you could essentially save yourself $17 million.