This Shelby Cobra just sold for £3.3m

This is one of just two Shelby Cobra 427 Super Snakes left in the world, and it has just sold at auction for a cool $5.1m.

At last weekend's Barrett Jackson sale in Scottsdale, this very rare and incredibly excellent 427 roadster went under the hammer; the second time Barrett Jackson has auctioned off this very car. They initially sold it in 2007 (and for more, too: last time it sold for $5.5m).

It's an amazing bit of kit. Starting out life as a 1965 ‘Competition' Cobra, it was shipped to the UK and did demonstration runs in Europe for a year before returning to Shelby American.

Then it was converted into the excellently-titled Super Snake and reclassified as a ‘Semi Competition' Cobra, one of just two built. The other one? The previous owner ended up driving it off a cliff into the Pacific Ocean. Ouch.

So, this one was actually owned by Carroll Shelby himself, features a twin-supercharged V8 engine with around 800bhp, a three-speed automatic gearbox, rear-wheel-drive, and looks absolutely fantastic.

"Why is [chassis number] CSX 3015 so historically significant?" explains Barrett Jackson. "Carroll Shelby. He built at a time when Americans where just Americans and proud to be Americans. He told me he built it just to see how fast it was and he told me it was a Monster that threw belts off on a regular basis."

Yowser. Have a scan through the pictures and tell us: is this the ultimate American sportscar?