The 1967 Super Snake: The One-Off GT500

If you are coming to this without the background, it helps to know the Shelby GT350 and GT500 story first. The short version for our purposes: by 1967 the GT500 was Shelby's big-block Mustang, and the Super Snake was what happened when somebody asked how far that idea could be pushed.

A regular GT500 with an irregular job

Start with the car it began as. The 1967 GT500 was a fiberglass-nosed fastback with a 428 Police Interceptor under the hood, two 600-cfm Holley four-barrels on an aluminum intake, and hydraulic lifters. Ford rated it at 355 hp and 420 lb-ft. It listed at $4,195, and Shelby built 2,048 of them that model year. It was a fast street car that started every morning and did not ask much of its owner.

That is not what Goodyear needed. The tire company wanted to show what its Thunderbolt tire could do at sustained high speed, and a street GT500 was not going to make that point loudly enough. Shelby's answer was to take one GT500 and give it an engine from a very different part of the Ford parts book. Nobody planned to sell that car to the public. It was a test tool that happened to wear a Shelby nose.

One correction worth making early, because it comes up at every meet. The Super Snake was not the only 1967 GT500 to get a 427. The record shows up to three GT500s received 427 engines that year. The Super Snake is the one built for the Goodyear test and the one that carries the name, which is why it is the one people mean.

What made the Shelby GT500 Super Snake different

The difference was the engine. Instead of the 428 street motor, 0544 got a lightweight racing 427 related to the engine Ford built for its GT40 Mk II endurance cars. It had aluminum cylinder heads and the Le Mans connecting rods that went with that program. The 428 and the 427 share a family and nearly share a displacement, but they were built for different lives. The 428 was a torque engine for the street. The 427 in this car was a race engine.

How much power it made depends on who you ask, and nobody has a factory dyno sheet to settle it. Published estimates run from 520 to 650 hp, and the figure you will hear most often is about 600 hp. I would treat any single number as a good guess rather than a rating. What is not a guess is what the car did with it.

Past 170 mph on the San Angelo oval

The test took place at Goodyear's facility in San Angelo, Texas, on a 5-mile oval. Shelby drove first and took the car past 170 mph, a big number for a car that still wore a production Mustang body.

Then came the part Goodyear actually cared about. The car ran 500 miles at an average of 142 mph, with Shelby at the wheel first and Fred Goodell, the Shelby American chief engineer who had picked 0544 and built it up for the test, taking over. When the run was done, the Thunderbolt tires still had 97 percent of their tread. That was the number Goodyear wanted, and the Super Snake delivered it. I have not found a record of the exact date of the test, only that it happened in 1967, so if you see a precise day quoted, ask where it came from.

Fred Goodell's name turns up again in Shelby history, and it is the same man. He was one of the Shelby engineers who turned the Green Hornet, the 1968 notchback prototype, into a test car, and in 1988 the owner who had identified it approached him to help put it back to its 1968 specification. That car, and the 1967 notchback that came before it, have their own strange history, told in Little Red and the Green Hornet. Between them and the Super Snake, the late 1960s left Shelby collectors a handful of one-off cars to argue about.

The run of 50 that never happened

A car that runs 500 miles at 142 mph gets people talking, and Shelby did consider building more. The plan on the table was a run of 50 Super Snakes with the 427. It went no further. The cars were judged too costly to build, and the regular GT500, with its 428 and its showroom price, stayed the big-block Shelby a customer could actually buy.

Looking at the numbers, it is not hard to see why. A street GT500 at $4,195 already sold well. A car with a race engine would have cost a great deal more to make, and it would have been a much harder car to live with on the street. The project died on the arithmetic, and that left 0544 as the only one.

"I have lost count of the white 1967 fastbacks I have seen with Super Snake on the side. Some of them are honest tributes and say so. The real one has a serial number that ends in 544, and that settles every conversation I have ever been part of."

Wayne Coburn

From Mel Burns Ford to the auction block

Once the testing was over, the Super Snake was sold like any other car, or close to it. It went through Mel Burns Ford in Long Beach, California, for $5,000, to two airline pilots. That is a little more than a regular GT500's list price, for a car with a race engine and a 170 mph test record behind it.

The car's later sales are better documented than most. It crossed the block at Mecum in 2013 for $1.3 million. In 2019 it sold again at Mecum's Kissimmee auction for $2.2 million, a record for a Mustang at the time. Those figures are history now, not a guide to anything, but they show how far the collector world came around to a car Shelby could not justify building more than once.

For all the money, what makes 0544 matter is that it answers a question the rest of the 1967 Shelby lineup only hints at. The GT500 was built for buyers. The Super Snake was built to show what the platform could survive at full speed for 500 miles, and it passed. It sits at the far end of a line that runs from the first Mustang to the last of the Shelbys, and if you want to see where that line starts, the whole story is the place to begin.

Sources and notes

• Old Cars Weekly: Car of the Week, 1967 Shelby GT500 Super Snake
• Supercars.net: GT500 Super Snake breaks record at $2.2 million
• Silodrome: the 1967 Shelby GT500 and its 428
• Supercars.net: 1968 Shelby EXP 500 hardtop, the Green Hornet
• Wikipedia: Shelby Mustang