Wednesday, June 24, 2009
The Shelby GT500 is a legendary performance Mustang that has been made, on and off, since the Sixties. It has more muscular styling, handling, and power than the regular "stock" Mustang for a serious upgrade in straight line performance as well as better cornering for the twisties. It has always been designed and built at Shelby's shop...erm, not any more.
Though the people at Shelby are supposed to have supervised design process, the new-generation "Shelby" GT500 Mustang is the first to be built at Ford, by Ford. This shatters a long-standing tradition of Shelby being an essentially separate organization, just getting the cars and some parts to tweak out. Shelby has now essentially become part of FoMoCo, and I'm surprised that I haven't heard much outcry by this point about this new development.
One major reason for this switch is probably the seemingly unstoppable fall of the economy. Shelby's small company wants the relative security of Ford, which makes Ford's toughness in these times all the more good for them. If Shelby would've made performance Dodge Chargers, they probably wouldn't have survived the K-car or these modern Fiat-induced times. Nevertheless, this new process will lose many fans among the Shelby customers, but will help keep the company alive.
