Exotic Cobra — Car built in Provo, sold around the world

PROVO — Tom and David Kirkham turn out about 75 exotic Ford Cobra sports cars every year.

Originally designed in England in the 1960s, the two-seater cars became popular when car builder Carroll Shelby dropped powerful Ford V-8 engines in them and began calling them Shelby Ford Cobras.

The cars were sleek, beautiful and at home on the race track as well as the street.

The Kirkhams came up with the idea of having the bodies manufactured from aluminum when they visited an airplane factory in Mielac, Poland.

The factory wasn't nearly as busy as it had been during the Cold War when workers were building Russian MiGs and other fighter and domestic planes, so officials there eagerly agreed to manufacture the Cobra bodies.

That was a decade ago.

Today, the car bodies are shipped to Kirkham Motor Sports in Provo where skilled craftsmen turn them into completed sports cars.

Original Cobras sold for some $9,500 in the 1960s, about three times the price of a passenger car, Tom Kirkham said. The new versions are still expensive, commanding from $85,000 to $120,000 each, depending on the features included.

The '60s originals have long gone into collector status, now worth from $500,000 to more than $1 million each.

While other companies sell Cobra kits for do-it-yourselfers to complete, and the heavier fiberglass-bodied roadsters, the Kirkhams claim the most quantity of Cobra construction. They even sell bodies to Shelby, who continues to build them in his Las Vegas plant, Tom Kirkham said. Those cars have steel frames; the Kirkhams keep the aluminum frame models for their customers.

The cars can be polished to a mirror finish or left satin. They are never painted.

So who would shell out a year or two of pay for a shiny, aluminum sports car?

Mostly self-employed businessmen, the brothers say. Some buyers are doctors and lawyers, but business people from around the world are the most common buyers — "from any type of business you can imagine," David Kirkham said.

"Our buyers were dreaming about them in high school when their English teacher was rambling about something else," Tom Kirkham said.