Ford never built a mid-engine Cobra, but in 1960s Britain a tiny sports car quietly sketched out what that alternate history might have looked like. While American muscle was busy perfecting the front-engine, big-block formula, a handful of engineers on the other side of the Atlantic were experimenting with compact mid-engine layouts that felt closer to a race car than a roadster. The result was a machine that, at least in spirit, comes startlingly close to the mid-engine Cobra Ford never signed off on.
Seen from today, this obscure British project reads like a missing chapter in transatlantic performance history, one where Carroll Shelby’s V8 thunder meets European chassis finesse. It arrived just as the supercar era was kicking off, then slipped into the background when the world fell hard for the Cobra and forgot almost everything else the same companies were trying to build.
The mid-engine Spitfire that thought like a Cobra
By the mid 1960s, mid-engine layout was becoming the new performance gospel, with the Lamborghini Miura turning the idea into a poster car while most drivers still lived in a world of front-engine coupes and roadsters. In that context, a British team took the humble Triumph Spitfire and flipped its script, relocating the powertrain behind the seats and creating a compact sports car that behaved far more like a prototype racer than a budget roadster. This mid-engine Triumph Spitfire arrived at a moment when mid-engined supercars were just taking off, yet it targeted normal buyers rather than the ultra-rich, which made its ambition feel oddly similar to what a mass-market mid-engine Cobra might have tried to do.
What made this experiment so wild was not just the layout but the power it was designed to handle. Reporting on the project notes that while Ford never made a mid-engine Cobra, this British reimagining of the Spitfire was engineered to cope with more power than a 427 Cobra, pairing its compact chassis with a transversely mounted engine and a rear-mounted transmission in the later prototypes. That combination of small footprint, serious output, and a mid-mounted drivetrain turned the car into a kind of thought experiment on wheels, a proof that a lightweight British shell could be tuned to deliver the sort of punch usually associated with a big American V8, as detailed in coverage of the mid-engine Triumph.
AC’s MA-200 and the road not taken
If the mid-engine Spitfire hinted at what Ford could have done, AC Cars came even closer to writing that alternate script outright. Enthusiasts still trade stories about a tantalizing scenario built around a simple question: What if Carroll Shelby had not called on AC to develop the Ace into the Cobra in the first place? In that version of history, the company’s own mid-engine ideas, centered on a sleek project known as the MA-200, might have taken the spotlight instead of the front-engine V8 bruiser that ended up defining the brand.
The MA-200 was more than a sketch, it was a fully realized prototype that previewed a different future for AC. A single example of the car, explicitly labeled as a prototype, was built with the internal designation MA-200, and the company invested heavily in its own engineering rather than simply waiting for an outside partner to supply power. Later, the chassis work that began with the MA-200 fed into the AC 428 program, where AC developed a new flat-six engine to power the car, a reminder that the firm was not just a Cobra body shop but a serious engineering house in its own right. The idea that AC might have followed this path instead of leaning so hard into the V8 roadster is at the heart of enthusiast discussions about the Carroll Shelby and partnership and the later evolution of the AC 428, where the number 200 survives in the MA-200 designation.
How the Cobra’s shadow hid Britain’s mid-engine ambitions
Once the Cobra hit the scene, its impact on AC’s image was immediate and overwhelming. The car’s shape was so muscular and so unapologetically American in spirit that it buried almost everything else the company ever made in the public imagination. That success came with a cost, because it meant the more nuanced, technically adventurous projects, including mid-engine concepts and later production cars, never got the same oxygen. In the years that followed, AC even launched the AC 3000ME, a compact mid-engine sports car that tried to bring some of that race-bred layout to regular buyers, but it arrived in a market that mostly remembered the company for one thing: the Cobra.
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