He Spent Years Hunting Down a Shelby Cobra, an AC Ace, and a 1968 GT500 — He Never Got to Finish Restoring a Single One

A collector spent years tracking down a genuine Shelby Cobra, a rare AC Ace, and a numbers-matching 1968 Shelby GT500 — three of the most coveted names to come out of Carroll Shelby’s era. He never got to finish restoring any of them. Now his daughter and her husband are working through the list, one barn-worn classic at a time.

Some car collections happen by accident. This one happened on purpose, over years, as one man tracked down three specific names: Shelby Cobra, AC Ace, and Shelby GT500. He found all three, dragged them home from wherever they had been sitting, and started making plans to bring them back to life. Then he ran out of time before he could finish a single one. On a recent episode of Hagerty’s Barn Find Hunter, host Tom Cotter returns to a story he had covered once before — except this time he is not there for the discovery. He is there for what happens after.

That distinction matters, because Barn Find Hunter almost never shows the “after.” Cotter has built the series around the hunt itself — knocking on doors, poking through barns and fields, finding cars nobody else knew were still out there. Hagerty’s own description of this episode says as much: “Rarely on Barn Find Hunter do we get to see the second half of the story, where the cars are pulled out, restored, and loved again. Here, we do.” In this episode, the collector’s daughter and her husband are the ones carrying the project forward, and Cotter walks through old photos and memories from the original discovery while checking in on how far each restoration has come.

Cotter is uniquely suited to a story like this one. Before Barn Find Hunter, he spent 25 years running motorsports public relations and later became one of the automotive world’s most prolific “barn find” authors, writing more than a dozen books about hidden and abandoned classics, including one literally titled “Cobra in the Barn.” Since 2016, he and the Hagerty crew have filmed more than 100 episodes chasing cars just like the ones sitting in this family’s garage.

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The three headline cars are a genuine Shelby Cobra, a rare AC Ace, and a 1968 Shelby GT500 — the non-KR version, from before Ford’s mid-year performance update. But according to the family’s own comments on the video, that is only part of the story: the full collection runs to roughly nineteen cars, spanning mostly the late 1970s through the early 1990s. By the family’s own account, most of those are not especially rare or valuable on their own. The value in this story is concentrated in the three headline cars, and in the fact that a family chose to finish what one man started rather than let a lifetime of hunting go to waste.

Why an AC Ace Belongs in the Same Sentence as a Shelby Cobra

Pairing a Shelby Cobra with an AC Ace in the same garage is not a coincidence of taste — the two cars share a birth certificate. The Cobra started life in England as the AC Ace, a lightweight roadster AC Cars had built since 1953, originally powered by a straight-six engine. When AC’s engine supplier stopped making that six-cylinder unit, the company needed a new heart for the car. In 1961, Carroll Shelby, freshly retired from racing on doctor’s orders, pitched AC’s owner on dropping a Ford V8 into the Ace chassis instead. Ford shipped over two small-block V8s that September, and by January 1962 AC’s mechanics in England had finished a prototype — chassis CSX2000 — that Shelby’s crew in the United States then fitted with a 260-cubic-inch Ford V8. That car is considered the first Cobra ever built. The Cobra program that followed ran from 1962 to 1967 and produced roughly 1,000 cars across every variant, from the original 260 to the fire-breathing 427. Every surviving AC Ace, then, sits at the literal starting line of one of the most collectible sports car lineages in American motoring history — which is part of why finding one parked next to an actual Cobra in the same family’s garage is not just a coincidence. It is the whole family tree in one driveway.

A 1968 GT500 That Isn’t a KR — and Why That Still Matters

The Shelby name shows up twice in this collection, and the GT500 sitting in this family’s garage tells its own smaller story inside the bigger Shelby history. Ford built the 1968 GT500 through most of the model year with a 428 Police Interceptor V8 under a single four-barrel carburetor and a specialty aluminum intake, officially rated at roughly 360 gross horsepower — enough to run the quarter-mile in the mid-14-second range in period road tests. Then, in April 1968, Ford swapped in the 428 Cobra Jet for a mid-year update: redesigned cylinder heads, a bigger Holley carburetor, functional ram-air induction, and a distinctive exhaust flange. That car became the GT500KR — King of the Road — and Ford, following the era’s habit of underrating engines for insurance purposes, officially listed it at only 335 horsepower despite it clearly outrunning the Police Interceptor car it replaced. The family’s Shelby is the earlier, non-KR version — a car with its own case for the more interesting engine story, if not the more famous nickname. Neither version is common. Ford built the 1968 GT500 in relatively small numbers to begin with, and the mid-year engine swap means any given 1968 car falls into one of two distinct mechanical camps depending on when it rolled off the line — a detail that shapes both its value and its story today.

What Makes This Collection Worth Saving

It is rare enough for a Barn Find Hunter episode to turn up one significant car. Finding a family holding onto a Cobra, an Ace, and a GT500 at the same time — with a restoration already underway on the shop floor — is the kind of thing Cotter has said he does not get to show often. Viewers responded accordingly: the comments on the episode are full of people calling it one of the best in the show’s run, several saying some version of the same thing — that the collector would be proud of what his family finished without him.

The daughter and her husband are not treating the rest of the collection as a payday, either. By their own account in the comments, one lesser car has already found a new owner, another is headed to a mechanic’s son as his first car for his sixteenth birthday, and others will go up for sale at below-market prices specifically to keep them on the road rather than parted out. It is the kind of ending a “barn find” story rarely gets: not just a car pulled out of the weeds and flipped for a profit, but a family finishing a job for someone who cannot see it finished himself.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.