Monster Mustang Shelby GT500 revealed at Detroit auto show

Posted by Talbot Payne on January 16, 2019

The Mustang GT500 is revealed Monday at the North American International Auto Show media preview at Cobo Center.

Detroit — Fear the Snake. Ford Motor Co. unveiled the most-powerful Mustang ever, the 700-plus horsepower Shelby GT500, at the Detroit auto show Monday morning.

The muscle car will take its place atop a Mustang lineup that includes a turbo-4 powered base Mustang, V-8 powered GT and high-revving GT350. For the first time in 50 years, the legendary GT350 and GT500 badges will be on sale together in Ford showrooms.

But where previous generations of the GT500 were drag-strip brutes compared to the more nimble, track-focused GT350, Ford says the third-generation GT500 will be an all-around athlete.

“Historically, the GT500 was about straight-line speed. Now this thing does everything — it’s a no-compromise muscle car,” said Ford Performance marketing chief Jim Owens. “Somewhere in heaven, Carroll Shelby is smiling. The GT500 was his favorite car.”

Shelby was the legendary performance guru who took Ford racing to another level in the 1960s with the LeMans-winning Ford GTs and steroid-pumped Mustangs. After the first GT500 was produced from 1967-1970, the badge was shelved until a 2007-13 production run.

The third-generation car takes aim squarely at the current king of muscle, the Chevy Camaro ZL1 and winged ZL1 1LE.

Like the 650-horsepower Camaro, the Mustang will get its 700-plus horses (the final number is still to be determined by Ford’s engineering team) from a massive supercharger atop of its V-8 engine. Engineers say the final torque number will be close to the Camaro’s 650.

The GT500 uses the same 5.2-liter block as the GT350’s 526-horsepower “Voodoo” V-8 (Ford engines get menacing nicknames). But its unique “Predator” engine will forgo Voodoo’s exotic flat-plane crankshaft, opting for a more familiar cross-plane crank instead.

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