Back in March, Ford promised to deliver a new Shelby Mustang that would top 700 HP. This week at the Detroit Auto Show, they made good on their word, with the 2020 Mustang Shelby GT500, christening it “the most powerful street-legal Ford ever.”
What, exactly, does that mean on the track? Ford speculates it’ll make a mid-3.0 second 0-60 MPH time and come in under 11 seconds in the quarter mile. But since official stats aren’t coming out until summer, with the release set for fall, we won’t focus too much on those.
What we will focus on, in all our waking as well as sleeping and daydreaming hours? The sound of those 700 ponies, which is on full display in the release video:
If you want to pull a Kevin McCallister and scare away the surly hotel concierge coming to kick you out of the Plaza, just crank the volume on that video and they’ll assume there’s a tiger in the room. Or a lion. Or a bear. Oh my, indeed.
All this power is coming courtesy of a hand-built, 5.2-liter supercharged V8 paired with a Tremec seven-speed, dual-clutch transmission — that is, automatic transmission. All you who missed the manual lesson can rest easy, because there’s no option for that (at least, none announced), so you won’t be shamed for going automatic. In fact, Ford notes that it’ll shift faster than any manual gearbox “in less than 100 milliseconds.” So either way, you’d be a fool not to go that route.
But hold your horses (pun intended). What do sub-11-second quarter-mile times and 700 HP outputs and 100 millisecond whatevers have to do with a street-legal car? Is the average driver — the one excited about the 12-inch LCD instrument cluster and optional B&O Play audio system — ever going to push this thing to its limits?
Depends how many citations you have on your record, I guess.
All images courtesy of Ford Motor Company
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