What would you do if you were hunting for classic muscle car barn finds and in a chance conversation about a 1969 428 Cobra Jet Ford Torino, someone said ..
“My neighbor has one sitting out behind his house.”
If you’re a serious barn finder, I’ll tell you what you’d do; You’d get up off your butt and hot foot it out to that property as fast as your legs could carry you, is what you’d do!
Well that’s exactly what Kevin Guinn did when he found out that a neighbor of a friend of his suggested that he had a 1969 Ford Torino sitting in the bush at the rear of their farm property.
But by Kevin’s own admission, the hills of Tennessee are pretty dense places, and the chance of a car like that being there, are very remote at best!
Yet on his trip out to that remote Tennessee farm, he knew what he was looking at even from a distance back ..
“I could barely make out the front end of a Torino. I thought, Man alive, very few people get to see stuff like this.”
Kevin was right, very few people get to see stuff like this which is what makes these situations rare and exciting.
But where he was wrong, pleasantly so, was that this was not just a 1969 Torino that was about to appear from the dense bush, but a highly coveted and rare 1969 COBRA version!
Under the hood was more than just a 428 Cobra Jet – which in itself would have been quite phenomenal by the way – but Kevin knew when he saw the oil cooler that it hinted at a Drag Pack and therefore knew immediately that he was looking at a SUPER Cobra Jet 428.
Further, the axle code on the trim plate revealed a 3.91-geared Traction-Lok 9-inch rear end, mandatory with the Super Cobra Jets ( ie ALL Cobra Jets with the 3.91 axle are SUPER Cobra Jets).
Kevin said .. “I had located a ’69 Mach 1, a real low-mile Cobra Jet. It was very well preserved, except they had blown the motor up.”
the Torino Cobra was found in the dense undergrowth, but that’s not where this amazing find ends! In walking towards the ’69 Torino, Kevin walked past a second Torino Cobra, which was also a ’69, and was also equipped in exactly the same way .
Both cars are SUPER Cobra Jet two-door hardtops with bench seats, Ram Air Induction , 3.91 Traction-Lok 9-inch diff axles, and four-speed transmissions. The only difference was the Cobra in the thickest bush had a factory tachometer in the dash whereas the second didn’t.
The original owner, Gene Lockner had bought the Cobra brand-new from Towne Gate Ford in nearby Greeneville, Tennessee. The odometer now showed 4,000 miles, which really meant 104,000 as it had obviously been clocked and turned over.
Gene says that he had bought the second Torino Super Cobra Jet in the mid ’70s from a professor at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City. He added that he didn’t go looking for this car, but that the teacher came by his house and offered it to him as he knew Gene had one just like it. In the end, Gene bought the Torino Super Cobra Jet for $900!
Gene was a little surprised when Kevin mentioned that he would like to buy both the Super Cobras, and although there was interest in the second elsewhere, Gene liked the idea of his two old Super Cobras going to one place and sold them to Kevin at a `reasonable price’.
Kevin plans to restore both the Super Cobra Jet’s to their former glory, but for now, as the 427-powered Cobra runs Ok, Kevin is having fun driving his muscle car.
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