2017 Shelby Super Snake 50th Anniversary Edition

The most expensive Mustang ever sold was never meant to be sold at all. Shelby American built it to destroy experimental Goodyear tires at sustained triple-digit speeds, and when a dealer tried to turn it into a fifty-car production run, exactly one buyer showed up. Five decades later Shelby built a 50th Anniversary Super Snake to mark the occasion. The gap between the two cars says everything about how legends get made.

Here is the twist most people miss about the world’s most expensive Mustang: it was not built to be a legend, and it was not priced like one either. Shelby American assembled the 1967 GT500 Super Snake because a Goodyear tire test needed something brutal enough to punish a set of experimental radials at sustained triple digit speeds, and a GT500 with a race engine happened to be the tool for the job. Carroll Shelby and a persistent California dealer figured there might be a market for fifty street versions once the prototype proved itself. The plan collapsed almost immediately, and the single car that existed sat unwanted. What happened to it next took forty-six years to resolve.

Built to Torture Tires, Not to Sell Cars

The Super Snake began as a Shelby American demonstrator built for Goodyear, meant to prove out the company’s experimental Thunderbolt tires under conditions no customer would ever replicate. Dealer Don McCain pushed Carroll Shelby to drop a 427 cubic inch competition engine, sourced from the GT40 program rather than the Ford parts catalog, into a GT500 destined for that duty. The result was a car with roughly 520 horsepower in an era when the standard GT500’s 428 Police Interceptor was advertised at 355. At Goodyear’s high-speed test facility in Texas, the car reportedly touched 170 mph and averaged around 142 mph across 500 miles, which was precisely the sustained abuse the tire program needed to see.

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Fifty Were Planned. Nobody Ordered One.

With the test complete, McCain proposed building fifty street Super Snakes for his dealership, and Shelby agreed in principle. The problem was arithmetic. The GT40-derived 427 alone added enormous cost, pushing the projected retail price to roughly double that of a standard GT500 at a time when the base car was already expensive. Buyers who wanted a fast Mustang could get a 428 GT500 for thousands less, and the marginal performance gain did not justify the spread to anyone walking into a showroom in 1967. The order book stayed empty. Not a single additional car was built, and the prototype became a one-off by default rather than by design.

From Unwanted Leftover to $1.3 Million

That leftover prototype then had a thoroughly ordinary life for a while. It eventually sold used at a substantial discount from its original asking price, changed hands among owners who understood roughly what they had, and passed through the collector market as the Shelby world slowly worked out that a genuine one-of-one car with documented Goodyear testing history was not the same thing as another GT500. The reckoning came at Mecum’s Original Spring Classic in Indianapolis in May 2013, where the car brought $1.3 million, the highest price ever paid publicly for a Mustang at that point (a record the same car would go on to break itself, selling again for $2.2 million at Mecum’s Kissimmee auction in 2019). It was, in the most literal sense, a car nobody wanted becoming a car nobody could afford.

What Shelby Built for the Fiftieth Anniversary

Fifty years after the prototype, Shelby American marked the anniversary with a modern Super Snake built on the S550 generation Mustang GT. The formula was recognizably the same: take Ford’s most capable production Mustang, add a supercharger, upgrade everything the extra power touches, and finish it in the striped livery the name has always carried. The base was Ford’s 5.0-liter Coyote V8, and Shelby’s supercharger packages were commonly advertised in the 670 to 750 horsepower range depending on which tune a buyer specified. Supporting hardware included upgraded brakes, adjustable suspension components, a Shelby-specific hood and fascia, wider wheels, and a numbered dash plaque tying each car to the anniversary run.

1967 Versus 2017 on Paper

The comparison between the two cars is more interesting than a straight horsepower contest. The 1967 prototype made its power through a hand-built race engine, no traction aids, drum-era chassis thinking, and tires that were themselves the experiment. The modern car makes considerably more through forced induction on a production block, and puts it down through independent rear suspension, electronic stability control, and tire technology that did not exist in any form in 1967. In objective terms the 2017 car is faster, safer and easier to drive quickly by an enormous margin. In collector terms none of that matters, which is the recurring lesson of the Shelby market.

How the Two Markets Actually Behave

For anyone actually shopping, the two ends of the Super Snake name behave very differently. The 1967 car is a single object with no market to speak of, valued entirely by auction event. Modern Super Snakes are continuing-series cars built in meaningful numbers, registered in the Shelby American registry, and traded like any other low-volume specialty vehicle, which means condition, mileage, tune specification and documentation drive the price. The registry entry is the key detail: a Shelby-built and registered car is a different asset from a Mustang with aftermarket Shelby parts bolted to it, and the paperwork gap between the two is where most of the value sits.

The Company That Had to Be Rebuilt First

It is worth noting that the modern car exists because of a business Carroll Shelby rebuilt late in life. Shelby American spent decades doing relatively little with the Mustang before returning to it in the mid-2000s, and the post-2007 Super Snake packages became the company’s most commercially successful product line by a wide margin. That the 50th Anniversary edition was possible at all is a function of Shelby having converted a one-off tire test mule into a permanent brand asset, decades after the original commercial plan for it failed completely. Very few automotive names have survived that kind of round trip intact.

The Same Idea, Fifty Years Apart

The through line between 1967 and 2017 is not horsepower or price but the same basic idea executed twice: take a Mustang that is already the fastest thing Ford sells, then overbuild it past the point of commercial sense. In 1967 that produced exactly one buyer and a car that sat unsold. In 2017 it produced a limited run that found customers immediately, because the intervening five decades had taught the market what the original prototype was actually worth. The prototype’s $1.3 million result did not just set a record; it retroactively justified every Super Snake Shelby has built since.

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