The 1967 Shelby GT500 Super Snake: How a Tire Promotion Spawned the Most Extreme One-Off Muscle Car

The muscle car era was built on a simple, intoxicating premise: take a giant engine, stuff it into an affordable coupe, and let the masses taste real speed. By the mid‑1960s, the Detroit horsepower war had already given the world legends like the Pontiac GTO and Dodge Charger. But in a small workshop linked to Ford, Carroll Shelby was thinking well beyond the ordinary. His creations weren’t just faster than the showroom competition—they were rewriting the physics of what a road‑legal American car could do. None of his projects embodied that ambition more than the one‑off monster known as the Ford Shelby Mustang GT500 Super Snake.

Shelby had already made his name by transforming the mild‑mannered Ford Mustang into the GT350, a corner‑carving brute with a massaged 4.7‑liter Windsor V8. In 1967 he upped the ante with the GT500, squeezing a thunderous 7.0‑liter Interceptor V8 under its long hood. For any other tuner, that would have been the peak. For Shelby, it was merely the starting point. He envisioned a Mustang that didn’t just dominate drag strips, but one that could stare down Le Mans prototypes. To do that, he needed an engine born on the circuit, not the assembly line.

The heart chosen was the legendary 427 FE, the same racing powerplant that had propelled the Ford GT40 to its historic 1‑2‑3 sweep at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans. In the GT40, that engine made 485 horsepower and 475 lb‑ft of torque. In the Super Snake, those numbers ballooned. While factory documentation remains elusive, auction house Mecum later listed the car’s output at a staggering 600 horsepower. This wasn’t an optimistic dyno guess—it was a figure that explained why the Super Snake performed feats that seemed impossible in 1967.

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