Ford Killed the Shelby GT500 Twice — The Comeback That Made It the Most Powerful Mustang Ever Built

Ford buried the Shelby GT500 name twice before bringing it back as a 760-horsepower supercharged Mustang capable of a 10.7-second quarter mile — and even Jay Leno couldn’t stop comparing it to a McLaren F1.

Ford discontinued the Shelby GT500 name in 1970, then let it sit dormant for thirty-seven years. When the badge finally returned, Ford discontinued it again after the 2014 model year. Nobody at Ford was promising a third comeback — least of all one violent enough to leave Jay Leno mid-sentence on his own show. When Ford’s global director of Icons, Dave Pericak, pulled into Leno’s garage with a pre-production 2020 Shelby GT500 and 760 horsepower sitting under the hood, the segment turned into something closer to a confession: the executive who had overseen the car’s development couldn’t stop comparing it to a McLaren F1. This is the story of how a muscle car that Ford twice judged not worth building came back as the most powerful production Mustang the company has ever sold — and why the man behind the wheel of some of the rarest supercars on earth was the one left without much else to say.

The Jay Leno’s Garage episode is built around a simple format Leno has used for years: bring the person who actually built the car, hand them the keys, and let the conversation go wherever the drive takes it. Here that person was Pericak, who by 2019 had spent 25 years at Ford and had already run point on the 2015 Mustang program before taking over Ford’s “Icons” group — Raptor, Bronco, and the GT350/GT500 Mustangs. He walks Leno through the numbers that made the 2020 GT500 the most powerful street-legal Ford ever built: 760 horsepower and 625 lb-ft of torque from a supercharged 5.2-liter V8, a 3.3-second run to 60 mph, and a 10.7-second quarter mile. Then he does what any engineer who genuinely believes in his own car would do — he takes it out on the road and proves it.

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What stuck with viewers wasn’t just the spec sheet. It was Pericak’s reaction every time Leno buried the throttle without warning, the running joke about explaining that “track mode is for the track only” right before demonstrating exactly the opposite, and the moment Leno turned to him and said, flatly, that he thought Pericak had the coolest job in the world — coming from a man who owns a McLaren F1 and dozens of other machines most car guys will never sit in. Commenters latched onto Pericak’s professionalism as much as the car itself, several noting that a Ford engineer holding his own against Leno’s off-the-cuff McLaren comparisons said as much about the GT500 as any dyno chart could.

The Nameplate Ford Buried, Then Dug Up Twice

The Shelby GT500 name goes back to 1967, when Carroll Shelby took the Mustang fastback and dropped in a 428-cubic-inch FE-series V8 marketed under the “Cobra Le Mans” banner. Ford and Shelby built only 2,048 of that first GT500, and the scarcity alone would have made it collectible even without what came next. In 1968 the car evolved into the GT500KR — “King of the Road” — running a refined 428 Cobra Jet V8 that Ford conservatively rated at 335 horsepower and 440 lb-ft of torque — a figure nobody believed then and nobody believes now, with real output widely pegged north of 400. By the summer of 1969, Shelby had ended his formal partnership with Ford. No 1970 GT500 was ever built; Ford simply re-tagged the leftover unsold 1969 cars with new VINs, black hood stripes, and a front chin spoiler, and quietly closed the book on the original run.

The name stayed off the market for the better part of four decades. When public demand finally convinced Ford to bring it back, the GT500 returned for 2007 on the fifth-generation S-197 Mustang platform, powered by a supercharged 5.4-liter V8 paired with a six-speed manual. That generation ran through 2014 — a run that included the 662-horsepower 2013-2014 GT500 and its 5.8-liter Trinity V8, briefly the most powerful production V8 built in North America — after which Ford let the nameplate go dormant a second time while the Mustang lineup regrouped around the GT350 and its flat-plane-crank Voodoo V8. The 2020 GT500 arrived as the third act — not a mild refresh of what came before, but Ford’s answer to a question the GT350 was never built to fully answer: what happens if you stop worrying about balance and just chase the biggest number Ford Performance can responsibly put on the street.

The Predator Under the Hood

Where the GT350’s Voodoo V8 uses a flat-plane crankshaft for high-revving, naturally aspirated character, the 2020 GT500 goes the opposite direction: a cross-plane-crank 5.2-liter “Predator” V8 fed by a large Eaton TVS supercharger, built specifically to survive boost rather than chase redline. The result is 760 horsepower and 625 lb-ft of torque routed through a seven-speed Tremec dual-clutch transmission — the first dual-clutch gearbox ever offered in a Mustang — to the rear wheels only. Ford’s aerodynamics package, developed with input from the GT supercar program, generates roughly 550 pounds of downforce at the rear axle at speed, which is part of why a car with this much power can post a 3.3-second 0-60 and a 10.7-second quarter mile without feeling like it’s fighting its own tires the whole way down the strip. Top speed is electronically limited to 180 mph. It’s a car built explicitly to embarrass anything with a Hellcat badge in a straight line, and commenters on Leno’s video didn’t shy away from making that comparison directly, several noting that even with a Redeye Hellcat’s raw power advantage, the GT500’s lighter weight and far sharper chassis meant it would likely come out ahead everywhere except a dead-straight drag strip.

That rivalry — GT500 versus Hellcat, versus the Camaro ZL1 1LE, versus whatever Chevrolet or Dodge had waiting in the wings — is really what forced Ford’s hand on this generation in the first place. By the mid-2010s, Dodge had turned the horsepower war into a spectacle with the Hellcat and Demon, and Chevrolet had answered with the track-honed ZL1 1LE. A Mustang wearing the Shelby name that couldn’t hang with either would have been worse than not building one at all. Ford’s solution wasn’t to out-supercharge Dodge on paper alone; it was to pair that power with genuine chassis and aero engineering borrowed from the GT program, which is exactly the distinction Pericak keeps circling back to throughout the video.

What Makes the 2020 GT500 Different From Every Mustang Before It

It would be easy to write the 2020 Shelby GT500 off as a horsepower flex — Ford chasing a number for the sake of a press release. What the Leno segment captures instead is a company that finally built the car the GT500 name always implied it should be. The original 1967-1969 cars were road-going muscle with a competition pedigree attached by marketing. The 2007-2014 revival was a genuine performance car, but one still chasing the ghost of the original rather than defining its own identity. The 2020 car is the first GT500 built with modern supercar-level engineering — active aero, a dual-clutch gearbox, launch control tuned by people who also worked on the Ford GT — wrapped around a name that used to just mean “the fast Mustang.”

The market backed that up almost immediately. Before a single customer car had even reached a dealership, VIN 001 of the 2020 Shelby GT500 — a yellow example with the Carbon Fiber Track Package — was driven onto the auction block at Barrett-Jackson’s Scottsdale sale by Edsel B. Ford II and Aaron Shelby, Carroll Shelby’s grandson. It sold for $1.1 million, the largest winning bid ever recorded on a Mustang, with every dollar going to JDRF’s type 1 diabetes research. Barrett-Jackson chairman and CEO Craig Jackson placed the winning bid himself. That’s not the kind of number a car earns just for being fast; it’s what happens when a nameplate’s history, a genuinely engineered performance car, and the right room full of bidders collide at the same moment.

That’s also why Pericak’s reactions throughout the video land the way they do. This isn’t a PR handler reciting talking points; it’s the engineer who greenlit the program watching his own car exceed what he expected it to do, in real time, next to a man who has driven nearly everything with four wheels ever built. When Leno tells him he has the coolest job in the world, it isn’t flattery — it’s one obsessive car person recognizing another. That’s the moment that turned a routine manufacturer walkaround into one of the most-watched Shelby GT500 videos on YouTube, and it’s exactly the kind of validation no marketing department can manufacture on its own.

Six years on, the 2020-2022 GT500 has already settled into modern-classic territory. Ford built it in limited numbers relative to the standard GT and EcoBoost Mustangs, and with the Mustang moving to the new S650 platform without a direct GT500 successor waiting in the wings, values on clean, low-mile examples have held far better than most modern performance Fords. For a car whose own creator spent an entire TV segment sounding almost surprised by what his team had built, that kind of staying power feels less like an accident and more like proof that Ford finally got the assignment right.

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