"I got a brand new car And I like to drive real hard, " Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger once sang. Perhaps in memory of his AC Cobra, which he bought in London in October 1985 and which still causes a sensation in Ses Salines today.
"The Cobra is certainly not a car for the faint-hearted," says Pedro Barahona, chef at the Casa Manolo restaurant and owner of Jagger's former supercar, with a mischievous wink. The reason lies mainly under the elongated bonnet of the roadster, a faithful replica of the AC Cobra built in England between 1965 and the early 1970s. There, a brutish V8 engine with more than 450 hp is at work, which not only gives the car a deafening roar, but also makes the rear axle dance across the tarmac at full throttle as uninhibitedly as David Bowie and Mick Jagger once did in the Dancing in the Streets video.
But how did he get his hands on Mick Jagger's car? "It was a big coincidence, of course," Barahona admits. One of his regular customers who was German had bought the car in England in the late nineties, although he doesn't know exactly how and where. "The first time I saw it parked at the door, I was amazed," he recalls.
Over the years, the owner, who lived in Ses Salines, received numerous offers to buy the car, but the German always turned them down. "One day I heard him say that if he sold the car, he would only sell it to me," recalls the Mallorcan. However, it was a tragedy that ended up provoking him.
"Bernhard became seriously ill after the turn of the millennium. Shortly before he died, he told me that I could buy the Cobra if I still wanted it. I agreed and gave him my word that I would look after the car as if it were my own son," he explains. The German died in early 2002 and the Cobra became the property of the Mallorcan. "We had to transport the car to my estate with the trailer because the engine no longer worked. Not only that, but after looking under the bonnet he realised that it was in worse condition than it looked.
"In the end I decided to restore the car completely," admits Barahona, who also studied mechanical engineering and is an aircraft pilot. Rebuilding the Cobra not only cost him a lot of money in spare parts, but also more than eight years of work in his own workshop: "My wife would sometimes call me at five in the morning to ask me where the hell I was. I was a bit obsessed," he says.