Shelby’s All-New 750-Horsepower Super Snake Debuts

For its 50th anniversary in 2017, Shelby American didn’t throw a retrospective – it built the most powerful Super Snake the company had ever sold to the public, with an optional supercharger pushing past 750 horsepower. Here’s what separates the base and optional power packages, what the hardware underneath had to do to handle it, and how a limited 500-unit run turned a legendary one-off into something you could actually order.

Shelby American picked a strange way to celebrate turning 50 years old in 2017 – not with a museum tour or a retrospective book, but by building the most powerful Super Snake the company had ever offered to the public. The name “Super Snake” goes back to 1967 and a single, one-off Shelby GT500 built for testing, a car so extreme Carroll Shelby himself reportedly couldn’t sell it at the intended price. Fifty years later, Shelby American turned that one-off legend into a 500-unit production run – and pushed the horsepower number well past anything the original ever saw. How much further could they actually take it?

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Two Power Levels, One Very Different Ceiling

The 50th Anniversary Super Snake starts with a supercharged 5.0-liter V8 using a Ford Performance blower for a baseline 670 horsepower – already well beyond what a stock Mustang GT makes. Step up to the optional Whipple or Kenne Bell supercharger, though, and output climbs past 750 horsepower, backed by either a 6-speed manual or automatic transmission. Shelby backed that power with hardware to match: a custom Ford/Shelby-spec suspension package and Wilwood brakes running 6-piston front and 4-piston rear calipers with a Shelby-designed cooling duct system, built to handle repeated hard stops rather than just one dyno pull.

What That Kind Of Power Actually Does

On paper, the numbers back up the hardware: 0-60 mph in 3.5 seconds, 1.2g on the skidpad, and a quarter mile in 10.9 seconds – supercar territory from a car that started life as a Ford dealership Mustang GT. Production was capped at 500 units, all built at Shelby American’s Las Vegas facility, with the base package starting at $36,795 on top of the donor Mustang GT’s price, putting a finished car’s total cost near $70,000. For a company built on the idea of taking a production Ford and making it faster than Ford ever intended, the 50th Anniversary Super Snake is about as pure a distillation of that mission as Shelby has built.

A Continuation Car, Not a Factory Special

The 50th Anniversary Super Snake isn’t something Ford ever built or sold – it’s a Shelby American conversion, performed on top of a regular Ford Mustang GT after the car leaves a dealership. That distinction matters to collectors and matters to Shelby American too: the company has kept building Shelby-badged Mustangs this way since well before Carroll Shelby’s death in 2012, taking a production pony car and re-engineering it into something Ford’s own lineup doesn’t offer. It’s the same formula that made the GT350 and GT500 names famous in the 1960s, just applied to a modern donor car.

Rivals Chasing the Same Horsepower Ceiling

Shelby wasn’t operating in a vacuum when it built this car. Dodge’s supercharged Hellcat-powered Challengers and Chevrolet’s Camaro ZL1 were both fighting for the same buyers during this era, each pushing factory or dealer-installed output well past what a base pony car could touch. That three-way fight pushed every manufacturer’s performance division to keep raising the ceiling, and a 750-horsepower Mustang conversion only made sense as an answer to cars that were already making comparable numbers from the factory floor.

Verifying a Genuine Shelby Conversion

Because a Super Snake starts life as an ordinary Mustang GT, authenticity comes down to paperwork rather than a VIN prefix. Shelby American issues its own serial number and documentation package for continuation and conversion vehicles, separate from the donor car’s factory build sheet, and that dataplate is what separates a genuine 750-horsepower build from a Mustang with an aftermarket blower and some Shelby decals. Buyers chasing a real one should expect to see that Shelby-issued paperwork alongside the underlying Ford title.

What a Supercharged Coyote Actually Feels Like to Drive

Underneath the badge changes and the brake upgrades, this is still fundamentally a modern Mustang GT, which means the driving experience stays civilized in a way a 1960s big-block Shelby never was. Power delivery from the blower is smooth and linear rather than peaky, the six-speed manual and the automatic both feel at home in daily traffic, and the upgraded Wilwood brakes mean the car can actually shed speed as quickly as it builds it, something the original 1967 Super Snake never had to worry about doing repeatedly.

Fifty Years of Taking a Mustang and Making It More

Whatever the specific horsepower number on a given Super Snake, the underlying idea hasn’t changed since 1967: buy a production Mustang, decide the factory didn’t go far enough, and fix that. The 50th Anniversary edition just happens to be doing it with a supercharger and a computer instead of a bigger carburetor, which is really the only thing that separates Shelby American’s mission today from the one Carroll Shelby started with a single overpowered GT500 test mule half a century earlier.

Not the Only Anniversary Special Shelby Has Built

Shelby American has leaned on milestone anniversaries to justify limited-run specials more than once over the decades, using a round number on the calendar as the occasion to build something the regular catalog doesn’t otherwise offer. The 50th Anniversary Super Snake fits that same pattern – a commemorative excuse wrapped around genuinely serious hardware, rather than just a badge and a numbered plaque.

Resale Considerations for a Dealer-Installed Package

Because the Super Snake conversion happens after a Mustang leaves the Ford factory, financing, warranty coverage, and insurance can all work differently than they would for a car built this way on the assembly line. Buyers shopping for one secondhand should confirm exactly how the Shelby modifications are documented and covered before assuming it works like a factory-warrantied Mustang GT.

The Cultural Weight of the Super Snake Name

Part of why a car like this generates attention beyond its raw horsepower number is the name itself – “Super Snake” has carried genuine weight in Shelby circles since that original 1967 test car, and reviving it for a 50th-anniversary build taps into decades of enthusiast recognition that a brand-new nameplate simply couldn’t buy. That built-in history is worth as much to some buyers as the numbers on the spec sheet.

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