Poster Child – 1967 Shelby GT500

Anyone with even a passing interest in muscle cars will know the name Carroll Shelby. The iconic Shelby was a car designer and racer, but his involvement with Shelby Mustangs was short-lived, Ford taking the design work in-house from 1969.

From 1966, Shelby’s Mustangs were no longer called Mustang, just Shelby GT350 or 500. In 1967, the Shelby GT350 and 500 were launched with a new, longer bonnet and changed front and rear bumper and grille to help differentiate them from the Mustang. The separate high-beam headlights were a neat touch and the horizontal tail-lights from a 1967 Cougar helped to further separate the Shelby models from their Mustang donor cars.

The GT350 hit the street with a 4.7-litre V8 thumping out 306 horsepower with peak power arriving at the 6000rpm redline. The GT350 could hit 96km/h in around seven seconds, which is quick even by today’s standards. The 1967 GT500 was the first GT500 from Shelby and was based on the 1967 Mustang Fastback (of Bullitt fame). It ran a 7.0-litre V8 with an impressive 2000-plus built in 1967. The unloved hero of the range was a prototype GT500 that ran a 427 FE GT40 racing engine and became known as the ‘Super Snake’… it failed to launch due to a lack of interest.

Nineteen-sixty-seven was an iconic year for Shelby. It saw the first of the GT500 models and the prototype Super Snake. In 1968, the Shelby cars were given the Cobra name which was then dropped in 1969 after an extensive and, in this writer’s opinion, horrific facelift.