The new Gt500 has Ford fans buzzing. Introduced at Detroit’s North American International Auto Show, this new Shelby puts out over 700 horsepower and will drop in showrooms this Fall 2019. The heart of this Mustang will be a 5.2 liter supercharged (of course) v8. The engineers who built this car wanted to make a car that was both drag strip and road course capable. If that 5.2 v8 sounds familiar it’s because it’s the same ultra-high revving Voodoo engine from the Gt350.
“If we were going to make the GT500 the pinnacle of the Mustang now, it has to do both. There’s just no question,” Carl Widmann, chief engineer at Ford Performance told me. “We have so much capability out of the GT350 and all the Performance Packs and the base Mustang lineup. To be that pinnacle or the halo for any Mustang, it had to have that capability.”
“We knew we wanted the 5.2-liter block out of the GT350,” Widmann said. “The trick was we had to really modify it to take all the boost that comes off that 2.6-liter Eaton supercharger.”
Unfortunately, Ford will not be offering a manual gearbox — queue keyboard slam. However, Widmann did not rule out the possibility of adding one. Ford wanted to go performance over traditions and will solely offer a dual-clutch transmission.
“What we’ve done is provided more customization on the track for different purchasers,” Widmann said. “It’s got a little bit more flexibility to set it up the way you want.”
We will keep you posted on further developments.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.