Ford Mustang GT500 – ALL BLACK 850-hp Shelby Super Snake

This all-black Ford Mustang Shelby Super Snake hides an 850-horsepower Kenne Bell-supercharged V8 under its blacked-out sheet metal, backed by a Wilwood brake package built to match. Only around 500 were built for the model year, making this one a rare sight outside a dedicated Shelby event. Read on to find out what it took to get there.

Ford never built an 850-horsepower Mustang from the factory — for that number, you have to go through Shelby American instead. Somewhere in the Super Snake program, Carroll Shelby’s namesake shop took an already-serious GT500 and turned the wick up to a level that reads more like a supercar spec sheet than a pony car. Paint it all black, badge it Super Snake, and you’ve got one of the most quietly terrifying things Ford ever let out of a dealership lot. Getting there involved a supercharger most Mustang owners have never even heard of, and a braking system built for a much heavier fight.

The Supercharger Behind the Number

The 850-horsepower Super Snake starts life as a 5.8-liter GT500 V8, then gets handed to Kenne Bell for a 3.6-liter LC supercharger conversion — complete with a high-performance radiator, an air-to-water intercooler, and an intake large enough to actually feed the engine’s appetite. Shelby offered the Mammoth kit across 750, 800, and 850-horsepower tiers, letting buyers choose exactly how much of the ceiling they wanted to live with day to day, from seriously quick to nearly uncontrollable on cold tires. Kenne Bell’s twin-screw supercharger design compresses air more efficiently at lower rpm than a comparable centrifugal unit, which is part of why the company’s kits have become a preferred choice among builders chasing both peak power and everyday drivability.

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What ‘Most Powerful’ Actually Means Here

At its top-spec output, the Super Snake became the most powerful 50-state-legal production muscle car of its era, a claim that required not just raw horsepower but full emissions compliance across every state — a much harder engineering target than simply maximizing output on a dyno with no regulatory constraints. Shelby’s ability to hit 850 horsepower while still passing California’s notoriously strict emissions testing is arguably a bigger engineering achievement than the horsepower figure itself.

Chasing 200 Miles Per Hour

That kind of output pushed the Super Snake into genuine 200-mph territory, a benchmark that puts it in company with exotic sports cars costing several times as much. Reaching that speed safely on a car built around a factory Mustang platform required Shelby to address aerodynamics and chassis stability well beyond what a stock GT500 needed, since stability at triple-digit speeds becomes a very different engineering problem than straight-line acceleration alone. Ford’s own GT500 already carried a track-focused aerodynamic package before Shelby’s changes, giving the Super Snake program a strong aerodynamic foundation to build on rather than starting from scratch.

Built to Stop as Hard as It Goes

Making 850 horsepower street-legal isn’t just about the engine — Shelby backed it with a Wilwood brake package running six-piston front calipers and four-piston rears on cross-drilled, vented rotors, plus front camber plates and remote-reservoir rear dampers to keep the chassis composed at speed. A car capable of 200 mph is only as safe as its ability to shed that speed just as quickly, which made the brake package as much a headline feature of the build as the supercharger itself.

How Rare an All-Black Super Snake Really Is

Only around 500 Super Snakes were built for the model year, all riding on 20-inch Shelby-designed wheels — which makes an all-black example like this a genuinely rare thing to see parked anywhere outside a dedicated Shelby event. Color choice on a limited-production car like this becomes its own layer of rarity on top of the already-small build number, since buyers gravitated toward a handful of popular Shelby-signature color combinations rather than a genuinely understated all-black scheme like this one.

The GT500 Foundation Underneath

Every Super Snake starts as a genuine factory GT500, which means buyers get Ford’s own engineering — a stiffened chassis, upgraded suspension, and a transmission rated to handle serious torque — before Shelby’s team ever touches the car. That foundation matters, since it means the Super Snake isn’t a generic aftermarket supercharger kit bolted to a base Mustang, but a purpose-built performance car reinforced from the factory up specifically to survive the abuse Shelby was about to add. Ford also equipped the GT500 with a transmission rated well beyond the needs of the standard car, giving Shelby’s engineers a drivetrain that could absorb the Super Snake’s additional torque without requiring a complete transmission redesign.

Shelby’s Naming Tradition

The Super Snake name traces back to a legendary 1967 Shelby Mustang built as a promotional tire-testing car, a lineage Shelby American has revived repeatedly across decades of Mustang generations whenever it wants to signal its most extreme available build. Attaching that name to the modern GT500-based car ties this 850-horsepower machine directly to Carroll Shelby’s own history of pushing factory Mustangs well past their intended limits.

Owning a Car Built for This Much Power

Living with a Super Snake day to day means accepting a car engineered around extremes most drivers will rarely use fully — insurance, tire wear, and fuel costs all scale with the car’s capability, and owners typically budget for specialized maintenance beyond what a stock GT500 would ever require. That trade-off is precisely why Super Snake ownership skews toward genuine enthusiasts rather than casual buyers chasing bragging rights alone. Many owners choose to keep a Super Snake as a weekend or show car specifically to limit that wear, treating it more like a collectible than a daily driver despite its street-legal certification.

A Quietly Terrifying Package

Between the Kenne Bell-supercharged 5.8-liter V8, the Wilwood brake package, and a production run capped around 500 units, the Super Snake earns its reputation as one of the most complete extreme-performance packages Shelby has ever built on a Mustang platform. Wrapped in all-black paint with nothing to announce its 850-horsepower heart, it’s exactly the kind of car that looks quiet right up until someone hears it start. Shelby’s willingness to build a car this extreme while keeping it fully street-legal across all fifty states remains one of the more remarkable engineering achievements to come out of the modern muscle car era.

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