Daughter Saves Her Late Father's Shelby Cobra, AC Ace, and 1968 Shelby GT500Finding Old CarsJohnny PuckettThu, September 10, 2026 at 5:21 PM UTCAdd us on GoogleDaughter Saves Her Late Father's Shelby Cobra, AC Ace, and 1968 Shelby GT500Most barn-find stories end the moment a car gets dragged out of storage and loaded onto a trailer. This one keeps going. In the latest episode of Barn Find Hunter, host Tom Cotter meets Molly and her husband, Jared, who recently became caretakers of an extraordinary collection that belonged to Molly's father before he passed awayThe first car up for exploration is a 1959 AC Ace, the British roadster whose chassis would later become the basis for the original Shelby Cobra. This particular Ace has been fitted with a small-block Chevrolet V8 in place of its factory inline-six, making it an unusual cousin to the Cobra it helped inspire. Molly and Jared plan to bring the Ace home to South Carolina and get it clean and drivable again.Next, Tom and the couple turn to a nearby garage holding a 1968 Shelby GT500. The fastback is weary but solid, and Molly explains that her father was its original owner, driving it regularly to and from work for years. Jared shares the story behind some non-original front-end parts, a small detail that hints at the car's long working life.AdvertisementAdvertisementThe real showstopper arrives last, sort of. Tom and Jared pull a fiberglass body from a trailer, and it's immediately recognizable as a Shelby Cobra silhouette, even though original Cobras wore aluminum skin. Tom lays the fiberglass front end next to the AC Ace to point out the design changes Carroll Shelby made when the Cobra went into production. The plan for this car goes well beyond bolting the body to a frame: a professional shop is handling a full restoration with hand-formed aluminum panels, and the car still has its original high-performance 289 V8.Stories like this one are a reminder of why so many of us fall for old cars in the first place. Long-parked machines carry family history along with their patina, and reviving them is as much about honoring the people who owned them as it is about the metal itself. We have covered similar reunions before, including a son bringing back his late father's 1957 Thunderbird and a Michigan family reuniting with their late father's 1978 Pontiac Trans Am. If you are weighing your own long-parked project, our guides on choosing between a barn find, a restomod, or a survivor and safely recommissioning a long-parked engine are good places to start.Watch the full Barn Find Hunter episode below to see every detail Tom, Molly, and Jared uncover.