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For the Super Snake’s fiftieth anniversary, Shelby American could have printed a badge and called it a celebration. Instead the Las Vegas shop built its first factory concept car in more than a decade, and pointed a nameplate famous for quarter-mile bragging rights squarely at road courses. Read on to find out what changed underneath, and why the width mattered more than the horsepower.
NR Classics fires up a numbers-matching 1967 Shelby GT500 Fastback, but the engine growling under that fiberglass hood is not the one Shelby’s own sales brochure promised buyers that year. The real story behind the missing Le Mans-bred 427 explains why every production GT500 got a different engine instead — and why nobody who owns one seems to mind.
This vintage road test puts Ford’s flagship 1968 Shelby GT500KR — the “King of the Road” — through its paces, complete with a narrator whose catchphrases are still being quoted in the comments decades later. Viewers reacted to a 6.2-second acceleration figure with genuine disbelief, while others noted the era’s characteristic brake fade after repeated hard stops. One commenter even claims The Doors’ Jim Morrison owned one. Watch to hear “happy time” for yourself.
Only 50 examples of the Shelby Terlingua Mustang exist, and Lou Costabile got a personal walkaround of this yellow one straight from Shelby American’s President and Vice President of Operations at the company’s Las Vegas facility. The name traces back to the 1967 SCCA Trans-Am Championship win, and the exclusivity shows in every detail the two executives point out on camera. Watch to see what separates this build from the other 49.
For a few months in 1966 you could walk into a Hertz counter, hand over a driver’s license, and drive away in a Shelby GT350 built to Carroll Shelby’s own specification. A thousand of them went into the rental fleet in black and gold. The stories that came back are the reason the program did not last. This black-and-gold 1966 is a tribute to those cars, and read on for why the originals are so hard to find intact.
This isn’t just another Super Snake — it’s VIN number one, the very first 2017 Shelby Super Snake Mustang built, and Shelby American’s own president is the one showing it off at Barrett-Jackson. Between a 750-horsepower Whipple supercharger and a price tag that climbed nearly 20,000 dollars in two years, this white-and-blue Mustang has more going on than its paint scheme lets on. Watch to see what makes build number one worth chasing.