Ford Mustang 2013 – Shelby GT500 Super Snake: Is 850 HP Too Much?

In 2013, Shelby American took Ford’s already-potent 662-horsepower GT500 and pushed it to 850 horsepower with a supercharger upgrade, forged-brake package, and dedicated cooling system, all backed by an official factory partnership. Only 500 of these Super Snake conversions were built, making a documented example rare even among modified Shelby Mustangs. Read on to find out what it actually cost to own one — and what living with that much power really demands.

Ford’s factory GT500 already made 662 horsepower straight off the showroom floor in 2013 — enough to make most muscle car owners nervous. Shelby American looked at that number and decided it wasn’t nearly enough. Their answer involved a supercharger upgrade, a completely reworked cooling system, and brakes borrowed from cars that cost twice as much, all in the name of chasing a horsepower figure that sounds almost irresponsible on a car you could still buy with a factory warranty. Only 500 of these were ever built, and the question posed by that number — is 850 horsepower too much? — deserves an actual answer.

From 662 to 850 With One Supercharger Swap

The base 2013 GT500 already ran a supercharged 5.8-liter V8 rated at 662 horsepower and 631 lb-ft of torque, which was serious enough on its own. Shelby’s Super Snake package came two ways: a 662-horsepower version that kept the Ford Racing/Whipple blower, or the full 850-horsepower build with a buyer’s choice of Whipple or Kenne Bell supercharger, either one paired with a 6-speed manual, a 3.31:1 rear axle (3.73:1 optional), and a short-throw shifter built to survive what the engine was about to put it through.

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Brakes and Cooling Built for the Extra Punishment

Putting down 850 horsepower reliably meant more than a bigger blower. Shelby fitted forged Shelby/Wilwood brakes — six-piston calipers up front, four-piston in the rear — with cross-drilled, vented rotors and dedicated front brake cooling ducts, plus a full Shelby Performance cooling package with a new radiator and heat exchanger. Wrapped in a unique fiberglass hood, satin black or gloss white Shelby stripes, and 20-inch spoked wheels, the Super Snake never let you forget what it was hiding.

What 850 Horsepower Cost in 2013

At $28,995 for the 662-horsepower package and $39,995 for the 850-horsepower version, on top of a base GT500 and limited to 500 units for the model year, it wasn’t cheap or common — but nothing about 850 horsepower from the factory ever should be.

A Name Borrowed From Shelby’s Own History

Carroll Shelby spent decades building a reputation for taking an already-quick factory car and making it faster still, going back to the original Cobra and Mustang GT350 programs of the 1960s. The Super Snake name itself predates this car by decades: Shelby hung it on just two twin-Paxton 427 Cobras in 1966-67 and on a single one-off 1967 GT500 fitted with a Le Mans-spec 427, a Mustang that would go on to sell for a record $2.2 million in 2019. Reviving that name for the 2013 GT500 tied Ford’s modern supercharged pony car back to that same tradition of pushing a factory platform past its original limits rather than starting from a blank sheet of paper.

Why This Wasn’t Just Another Tuner Build

Unlike an independent shop buying a used GT500 and modifying it on its own terms, Shelby American’s Super Snake program worked from new cars supplied through Ford’s dealer network, applying its supercharger, brake, and cooling packages before a customer ever took delivery. That factory-adjacent process is part of why a documented Super Snake carries a different kind of paperwork trail than a garage-built high-horsepower Mustang — the modifications were performed and recorded by the same company whose name is on the fender, not reverse-engineered later by an appraiser guessing at what was done and when.

Measuring Up Against 2013’s Other Factory Muscle

The GT500’s most direct rival that model year was the supercharged Camaro ZL1, which Chevrolet rated at 580 horsepower — already more than 80 horsepower behind the standard GT500 before Shelby’s Super Snake package widened that gap dramatically further. That comparison explains why a Super Snake carried such outsized bragging rights among pony car shoppers at the time, arriving years before Dodge’s supercharged Hellcat engines would reset the entire horsepower conversation industry-wide.

The Trade-Offs of Living With 850 Horsepower

A supercharged street car making this much power comes with real ownership demands: premium fuel is typically non-negotiable to avoid detonation under boost, the drivetrain has to be built to survive repeated hard launches, and heat management under the hood becomes something an owner thinks about constantly rather than occasionally. Shelby’s dedicated cooling package was designed specifically to address that last point, but keeping a car like this reliable over the long haul still calls for an owner who treats it more like a race-adjacent machine than an ordinary commuter.

Why Only 500 Cars Made the Rarity Claim Stick

Ford built tens of thousands of standard GT500s across that generation, which makes a run of just 500 Super Snake conversions for the model year genuinely scarce by comparison rather than merely marketed that way. That kind of production gap is a big part of why documented, unmodified Super Snakes have held collector interest specifically within the Shelby community, distinct from the broader market for standard GT500s that shared the same basic platform.

Two Supercharger Paths to the Same Number

Shelby’s decision to offer both a Ford Racing/Whipple supercharger and a Kenne Bell twin-screw option on the same Super Snake package gave buyers a genuine engineering choice rather than a single default configuration, since the two blowers, both twin-screw designs but from different makers with their own rotor packs, case sizes, and tuning philosophies, can deliver power in noticeably different ways depending on how the driveline and gearing around them are set up. Offering two distinct paths to roughly the same headline number shows how much flexibility Shelby built into the program instead of simply picking one blower and calling it finished. That kind of choice also gave buyers a reason to talk to a Shelby specialist directly about how they planned to actually drive the car, rather than treating the Super Snake as an off-the-shelf spec sheet item like an ordinary factory option box.

A Warranty Car That Drove Like Anything But

What made the 2013 Super Snake remarkable wasn’t only the horsepower figure — it was that a buyer could walk into a Ford dealership and drive away in an 850-horsepower car built through an official manufacturer partnership, rather than sourcing that kind of output through an underground shop deal with no factory backing at all. Decades from now, that combination of factory backing and genuinely extreme performance is likely to be exactly what keeps the 2013 Super Snake relevant to collectors, long after more common GT500s have blended into the broader used-car market. Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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