Ford Built the Most Powerful Mustang It Had Ever Made in 2022 — Then Killed the Shelby Name a Year Later

The 2022 Shelby GT500 packed 760 horsepower from a supercharged V8 nicknamed Predator, making it the most powerful Mustang Ford had ever built. It also turned out to be the last Shelby Mustang the company would make.

Ford built a 760-horsepower Mustang, gave it an engine nicknamed after an apex predator, and then quietly walked away from the whole idea a year later. No replacement. No Shelby badge at all on the next-generation car. The 2022 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500 wasn’t just another trim level in a long line of fast Mustangs — it turned out to be the final one, the last car to wear the Shelby name straight from a Ford factory floor. A reviewer put one through its paces on camera and asked the question every GT500 owner already knew the answer to: is this the best Mustang Ford ever built? The comments underneath the video, years later, read less like reviews and more like eulogies for a car people still can’t believe got cancelled.

The Review That Still Gets Comments Years Later

The video in question isn’t a flashy launch event or a manufacturer press clip — it’s a straightforward walkaround and drive review asking a simple question: with the GT500’s run winding down, does it deserve the title of best Mustang ever built? The reviewer walks through the exterior changes that separated the final-generation GT500 from the standard Mustang GT, including the unique front fascia, the aggressive grille opening needed to feed the supercharger, and the staggered 20-inch wheels. Inside, the car gets a full leather interior and a 12.3-inch digital instrument cluster, a detail multiple commenters singled out as superior to the stuck-on-looking screens Ford would later adopt on other Mustang trims.

What stands out watching the review now is how little of it is marketing language and how much of it is just someone trying to explain why a car this loud, this stiff, and this impractical for daily driving is still worth obsessing over. That tension — brutal on paper, beloved in practice — is the entire story of the GT500’s short life.

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The Engine Ford Called Predator for a Reason

Under the hood sits the 5.2-liter supercharged “Predator” V8, a cross-plane-crank engine built specifically for this car and, at the time, the most powerful engine Ford had ever put into a production vehicle. It made 760 horsepower and 625 lb-ft of torque, routed through a Tremec seven-speed dual-clutch transmission to a 3.73 Torsen rear axle. Ford’s own figures put the GT500 at 3.4 seconds to 60 mph, an 11.3-second quarter-mile at 132 mph, and a top speed of 180 mph — numbers that would have been supercar territory a decade earlier, packaged into a Mustang with a back seat and a trunk.

The GT500 wasn’t built to be subtle about any of this. Brembo brakes, MagneRide adaptive damping, and a chassis tuned by the same team responsible for the track-focused GT350 meant the car could actually use all 760 horsepower on a road course, not just a drag strip. That combination — a drag-strip engine wearing a road-course chassis — is what separated the GT500 from earlier Shelby Mustangs that leaned almost entirely on straight-line power.

From Carroll Shelby’s Cobra Kit Cars to a 760-Horsepower Factory Mustang

The Shelby name attached to a Ford didn’t start with a Mustang at all — it started with Carroll Shelby stuffing Ford V8s into lightweight AC Ace roadsters in the early 1960s to build the Cobra, a car with little regard for comfort and even less for subtlety. When Shelby turned his attention to the Mustang later that decade, the goal stayed the same: take Ford’s regular pony car and make it faster than anything else wearing a Ford badge. That partnership came and went over the decades, revived and retired more than once as Ford’s appetite for a factory-built, race-bred Mustang rose and fell with the market. The modern GT500, reintroduced for the 2020 model year after a long hiatus, was Ford’s biggest swing yet at that original idea — not a tuner kit bolted onto an existing car, but a purpose-built halo model engineered from the ground up around one engine.

That history is part of why the GT500’s 2022 send-off landed so hard with longtime Mustang fans. The Shelby badge had survived discontinuations before and come back stronger each time. This time, Ford gave no indication a comeback was coming, and the seventh-generation Mustang’s launch without any Shelby variant made the silence feel permanent rather than temporary.

GT500 vs. GT350: Two Different Philosophies Under One Badge

It’s worth separating the GT500 from its stablemate, the Shelby GT350, because the two cars approached performance from opposite directions. The GT350 used a naturally aspirated 5.2-liter “Voodoo” flat-plane-crank V8 that revved to a screaming 8,250 rpm and made its power high in the rev range — a car built for road courses first. The GT500’s supercharged Predator V8 took the opposite approach: a cross-plane crank built for massive, low-end torque and brute-force acceleration, with enough chassis hardware borrowed from the GT350 to keep that power manageable in corners. Ford essentially built two different answers to “how do you make the ultimate Mustang” and sold them side by side for several years before retiring both within a few years of each other. Collectors now treat both as bookends of the same era — the GT350 as the purist’s choice, the GT500 as the one you buy when 760 horsepower sounds like a reasonable number for a street car.

Why 2022 Was the End of the Line

Ford confirmed that the GT500 would bow out after the 2022 model year, closing the book on the sixth-generation Mustang’s Shelby chapter. When the seventh-generation Mustang arrived for 2024, there was no Shelby GT500 waiting to replace it — Ford instead positioned the Dark Horse as its new range-topping performance variant, and the Shelby name went quiet on new Ford showroom floors entirely. For a company that had used the Shelby badge, in one form or another, since Carroll Shelby’s original Cobra-era Mustangs of the 1960s, ending the GT500 without an immediate successor marked a real break in that lineage.

The timing matters, too. The GT500 arrived in a muscle car market that had spent the previous decade in a genuine horsepower war — Dodge’s Hellcat-powered Challengers and Chargers pushing past 700 and then 800 horsepower, Chevrolet countering with the Camaro ZL1. The GT500’s 760 horsepower was Ford’s answer, delivered starting in 2020 and refined through 2022, right as all three manufacturers began signaling the end of their gas-powered muscle car era in favor of electrification. The GT500 didn’t lose to a competitor on a drag strip. It lost to a calendar.

What Owners Say After Putting Real Miles on It

The real evidence for the GT500’s reputation isn’t in the spec sheet — it’s in what owners say once the new-car excitement wears off. Commenters on the review describe racking up 25,000 miles on a 2022 GT500 and still calling it “such a pleasure to drive,” while others flatly state they’ll never sell theirs. More than one owner pushed back on criticism of the car’s gloss black trim and interior styling, arguing the dash and taillight design actually aged better than the facelifted Mustangs that came after it. That’s a rare thing for a performance car to earn: genuine daily-use loyalty from people who already know exactly how fast it is and have moved on to caring about how it feels to live with.

It’s that combination — a genuinely unhinged engine wrapped in a car people actually want to keep driving years later — that explains why the GT500’s cancellation still generates disbelief in comment sections. Ford didn’t build a car that disappointed anyone and then discontinued it. It built one of the most capable Mustangs in the model’s history and walked away anyway.

For a sense of how far back the “build the most powerful thing we can, logos be damned” instinct runs in Detroit, Plymouth’s approach to naming the Road Runner after a cartoon bird is its own case study in a different era chasing the same impulse: give buyers more than they expect and let the legend write itself.

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