Hop in and buckle up. We’re about to take a trip back in time, before the Great Recession and Barack Obama, a time when Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson were still alive. The year is 2006, and the place is the Factory Five assembly plant in Massachusetts. The car is a Factory Five Mk II, its driver is Nate Johnson, and on the wheels are the latest tire craze; colored smoke.
What follows is a patriotic burnout that, to date, has garnered over 700,000 hits on YouTube. We stumbled across this gem over on the Spohn Performance Facebook page.
For the uninitiated, Factory Five Racing builds the best replica Shelby Cobra’s you’ve ever seen. Affordable and well-made, Factory Five has garnered a well-earned reputation for quality components, same as Spohn Performance. You can fit just about anything under the hood of a Factory Five Roadster, and their light weight means a lot of fun.
This particular Cobra was owned by Factory Five employee Nate Johnson. His roadster was powered by a fuel-injected and supercharged small-block engine, which explains why these tires were so quick to turn into smoke. We weren’t expecting colored smoke, that that is exactly what we got. Colored smoke tires were still really new back in 2006; now they’re almost passe.
But this video is still cool, almost six years later. Will the Shelby Cobra body style ever fall out of favor?