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Carroll Shelby’s heart condition ended his racing career, but it never slowed down the second act that followed. From founding Shelby American in 1962 to shaping the Cobra, the Shelby Mustang, and later Dodge’s Viper program under Lee Iacocca and Bob Lutz, Shelby left his fingerprints on two rival American automakers at once. Read on to find out how one man’s name ended up on performance cars from both Ford and Dodge.
Genuine 427 Cobras are among the rarest and most valuable American performance cars ever built, and “the real deal” is not a phrase serious Cobra people use lightly. This 1965 example carries the side-oiler 427 that turned a British roadster into one of the most feared machines on any road or track. Read on to find out what separates a true 427 Cobra from the thousands of replicas built in its image.
Car #180 is one of only 34 Shelby GT350R competition coupes ever built, and under driver Tommy Hamilton it won International Conference championships in 1967 and five west coast titles in 1968 — more than 40 race wins across two seasons. Decades later, a comment from Hamilton’s own son turned this video’s technical debate about horsepower and dyno numbers into something far more personal. Watch to see why this particular Shelby still means so much to the people who remember it racing.
This “1965” Shelby AC Cobra carries a genuine CSX chassis number, a 550-horsepower 427 side-oiler, and just 6.1 miles on the odometer — numbers that don’t add up until you understand the continuation series Carroll Shelby’s own company built to keep his legend alive. Read on to find out what actually separates a car like this from the thousands of Cobra replicas on the road today.
The 1965 Shelby GT350 only exists because SCCA rules demanded a minimum run of street cars before Ford could go racing in B Production. What Carroll Shelby handed back had no rear seat, one paint color, side-exit exhaust, and 306 horsepower from 289 cubic inches. Roughly 562 were built that first year before the formula softened. Read on for what made the first-year cars different from everything that followed.
Shelby American’s answer to the F-150 was not a lift kit and a set of tires. It was a Whipple supercharger on the 5.0-liter Coyote V8, 750 horsepower, a lowered chassis, and a price approaching six figures — three hundred horsepower more than the Raptor Ford was building at the same time, and only 150 of them for the model year. Read on to find out what Shelby actually changed, and why a street truck rather than a desert runner was the point.
Ask ten muscle car fans to name the greatest of all time and you will get eleven answers and one argument. A reader poll settled it once, and the results are stranger than you would expect: the car that finished first was never designed to race, and the car with the highest horsepower rating finished second. Read on for the full countdown and the numbers behind each placing.
The AC Cobra didn’t start out as the V8 icon everyone remembers — Carroll Shelby had to rip out its underpowered straight-six and drop in a Ford V8 to make the legend happen. Only 998 originals were ever built. This modern replica carries the same shape forward in carbon fiber over a tubular steel frame, shedding weight the original engineers never could.
When Carroll Shelby learned Bill Cosby had been driving foreign exotics, he didn’t just object, he built a 900-horsepower Cobra Super Snake to settle the argument. CSX 3303, one of only two automatic Super Snake 427s ever made, arrived at Cosby’s front door via Shelby’s associate Barry Galloway, complete with a dash plaque guaranteeing 200 mph. Cosby drove it once around the block and handed the keys straight back. Read on to find out how a department store argument turned into one of the strangest deliveries in Shelby history.
The 1970 Shelby GT500 is the rarest single model year in the nameplate’s history, and the reason is one of the strangest stories in Ford’s performance past: there was never really a 1970 production run at all. Just 286 GT500s wore 1970 VINs, and they were applied to leftover 1969 cars under federal supervision. Here is how it happened, how to spot a genuine one, and why Carroll Shelby had already walked away by then.
The quickest vintage Mustang on the planet does not have a carburetor, a camshaft, or an exhaust note. Built from a 1968 fastback by a shop in Austin, Texas, it runs a quarter mile in the nine-second range and holds a top-speed record set over a flying mile. The numbers behind it are strange enough that most people have to read them twice. Read on for what is actually bolted under that sheet metal.
This 1967 Ford Mustang GT Fastback started life as a documented S-code 390 California car before a ground-up rebuild pushed it to Shelby GT500 specification inside and out, right down to the correct wheels and fiberglass hood. Backed by a Marti Report and sold through Fast Lane Classic Cars, it offers genuine Shelby presence at a fraction of what a real 1967 GT500 now commands at auction. Watch to see the build up close.
Built almost exclusively for California dealers and inspired by a secretive Shelby prototype, the 1968 Mustang GT/CS combined fog lamps, a rear spoiler, and exclusive striping into a distinct model Ford never planned as a mainstream offering. Production fell short of its 5,000-unit target, and the car’s own name is still debated by historians decades later. Read on to find out how one regional sales manager talked Dearborn into building it.