2017 Super Snake Shelby Mustang VIN # 1 & Engine Sound

This isn’t just another Super Snake — it’s VIN number one, the very first 2017 Shelby Super Snake Mustang built, and Shelby American’s own president is the one showing it off at Barrett-Jackson. Between a 750-horsepower Whipple supercharger and a price tag that climbed nearly 20,000 dollars in two years, this white-and-blue Mustang has more going on than its paint scheme lets on. Watch to see what makes build number one worth chasing.

Somewhere in a warehouse, a production line assigns a number to every car that rolls off it, and most of those numbers mean nothing to anyone outside the factory. Then there is VIN number one — the very first unit of a run, the one number every serious collector wants and almost none of them get. At Barrett-Jackson’s Scottsdale showroom in January 2018, the President of Shelby American himself is standing next to the one that got away with it: the first 2017 Super Snake Shelby Mustang ever built. What makes a first car worth more than an identical second one is a longer story than the paint job suggests.

Who Gets to Present VIN Number One

This particular Super Snake is not being shown by a random dealer or a private collector — it is Gary Patterson, President of Shelby American, walking through the details himself on My Car Story with Lou Costabile. That alone signals how Shelby American treats its build-number-one cars: they do not just sell them, they showcase them, using VIN number one as a rolling advertisement for what the Post Title Conversion program is capable of. White paint with blue stripes is the classic Shelby color combination, tying this limited-production car visually back to the GT350s and GT500s that built the brand’s reputation decades earlier.

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What Post Title Conversion Actually Means

Unlike a factory-built Shelby, the Super Snake starts life as a standard Mustang GT that already has a title, and Shelby American converts it afterward — hence Post Title Conversion. That distinction matters for buyers, since it means the upgrade path is available even after a Mustang GT has already been registered and driven, rather than requiring a special order from new. It is a business model that has let Shelby American keep building genuinely limited-run performance cars long after the factory-direct GT500 program wound down for a given generation.

The Supercharger Question Fans Keep Asking

One commenter asked directly for horsepower and torque figures, and the answer depends entirely on which tier of the 2017 Post Title Conversion package this VIN number one car received. The base package pairs the Coyote 5.0 with a Ford Performance-branded supercharger good for 670 horsepower, while stepping up gets buyers a full 750 horsepower from either a 2.9-liter Whipple or a 3.2-liter Kenne Bell supercharger, the latter offered in either polished or matte black finish — giving buyers a genuine choice in how their Super Snake looked under the hood, not just how it performed.

Pricing a Legend

The numbers in the comments are just as telling as the horsepower figures. The base 670-horsepower Post Title Conversion package started at 36,795 dollars, while stepping up to the full 750-horsepower Whipple or Kenne Bell setup pushed the package price to 56,866 dollars. That price gap between the two tiers reflects the added supercharger hardware and tuning work behind the extra 80 horsepower, and it explains why VIN number one — built to the full 750-horsepower spec — represents Shelby American’s top-shelf presentation of the 2017 50th Anniversary program.

A Widebody Rumor That Became Reality

In the comments, one enthusiast speculated hopefully about a widebody package coming to the Super Snake lineup, tying it to the 50th Anniversary Mustang GT edition. That speculation reflects how closely Shelby American’s fanbase tracks every rumor about upcoming packages, treating each model year’s changes like chapters in an ongoing story rather than isolated product releases — the kind of attention to detail that keeps a build-number-one car like this one relevant years after it left the showroom floor.

A Car People Still Want to Buy

The comments section is not just nostalgia — it is a marketplace. One viewer mentions owning the exact same car, build number 1P, and currently has it listed for sale in New Zealand, proof that these Post Title Conversion Super Snakes carry real value well beyond their original purchase price. For a limited-production performance car built on a mass-production platform, that kind of sustained resale interest is not guaranteed, and it says as much about the strength of the Shelby name as it does about the car itself.

Why VIN Number One Still Matters

In a production run where every unit gets the same supercharger, the same tune, and the same badge, VIN number one is the one thing that cannot be duplicated. It is the car Shelby American chose to put in front of cameras, the one its own president chose to introduce personally, and the one that will always carry the paperwork proving it came first. For collectors chasing provenance as much as performance, that single detail is worth more than any horsepower number on the spec sheet.

The Name Traces Back to Carroll Shelby Himself

The Super Snake name did not start with this generation of Mustang. It traces back to 1967, when Carroll Shelby’s own shop built a one-off 427 Cobra fitted with dual superchargers specifically as a rolling testbed, a car so aggressive that its brief celebrity test driver reportedly handed it back after a single high-speed run and said it was too much car. That original Super Snake became automotive legend precisely because almost nobody who drove it wanted a second turn behind the wheel. Shelby American reviving the name decades later for a Post Title Conversion Mustang package is not a coincidence — it is a deliberate connection to that reputation, promising buyers a car built to intimidate in the same spirit as the original, even if the underlying platform, era, and engineering are entirely different. For serious Shelby collectors, that lineage is part of what makes VIN number one of any new Super Snake run worth chasing in the first place.

Why This Particular Story Keeps Circulating

Barrett-Jackson’s Scottsdale events attract a specific kind of car coverage every January, with dozens of channels filming walkthroughs of whatever rare or notable metal happens to be on the floor that week. Most of those videos fade into the general churn of collector car content within a year or two. This one has kept resurfacing specifically because VIN number one is not a detail that expires — a car’s build number stays fixed forever, which means the story of Gary Patterson personally introducing the very first 2017 Super Snake remains just as relevant to a Shelby collector watching years later as it was the week it was filmed. Combine that permanence with an owner in the comments actively trying to resell the car, and the video functions less like a nostalgic clip and more like an ongoing piece of provenance documentation, the kind of primary-source video a future buyer might actually reference when verifying this specific Mustang’s history down the line.

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