Here’s something to look forward to at the 2019 Detroit auto show: The Mustang Shelby GT500, a car which Ford says will be its most powerful street-legal production vehicle to date.

Yep, after taking the wraps off the 2019 Bullitt, and rolling out one of the original cars from the Steve McQueen movie alongside it for good measure, Ford decided to go one step further and tease an even more extreme take on the Mustang. You know, for those of you who thought the GT350 wasn’t quite enough car.

This isn’t a total surprise — we’ve suspected the GT500 has been in the works for a while now. But now we know exactly when we’ll see it. You can check out a few bits and pieces of the car in the teaser video above; that’s all we’ve got for now. It’s about one minute of creepy CGI snake eyes, tight shots of a wing, vents and mega-low front aero, plus a guest appearance by a vintage GT500.

Being a teaser, it’s short on anything substantive…except for the promise of 700-plus horsepower courtesy of its supercharged V8. That’s enough to handily best the 647 hp of the Ford GT (then again, the last-gen GT500 already did that with 662 hp), and put it within venom-spitting distance of the Dodge Hellcats — not that horsepower alone is the sole measure of a performance car. But if the GT350 is anything to go by, it’ll go around a track beautifully and sound wonderful doing it.

Maybe this is how it’s going to be from here on out: For every electric SUV, we get a nutso modern twist on a classic V8 pony car. If this is Ford’s idea of maintaining balance in the universe, we’ll take it.

Graham Kozak – Graham Kozak drove a 1951 Packard 200 sedan in high school because he wanted something that would be easy to find in a parking lot. He thinks all the things they’re doing with fuel injection and seatbelts these days are pretty nifty too.
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