2013 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500: Dyno Tested

It's still a shock, this 2013 Ford Shelby GT500. The thought that anyone with $55-ish grand can plop into a Ford dealer and drive out in a 200-ish-mph car... it's just batty, in the best way possible.

Dan took his sweet time driving the GT500 cross-country, and now it's time to get busy with it. First off, we visited our usual dyno haunt, MD Automotive in Westminster, CA, to get a better idea of its fortitude.

 

The 2013 GT500 isn't a supercar per se, but its 5.8-liter supercharged V8 engine's stats have officially put the supercar establishment on notice. Factory ratings of 662 horsepower and 631 lb-ft of torque at the flywheel. In a Mustang. America is awesome.

Its mill has roots in the original "Modular" engine that debuted in the 1991 Lincoln Town Car with 190 hp, but for the GT500 the unit has been so comprehensively overhauled that there's little beyond bore spacing common among the dental records. Let's take a looksee at what 22 years hath wrought:

It's just a monster of a torque curve, that. On the Dynojet 248 chassis dyno, we measured a peak of 603 lb-ft at the wheels arriving at 3900 rpm. There's more than 500 lb-ft (at the wheels) on tap between 2200 and 6000 rpm, which is just a juicy, dirty mound of torque in a production pony car engine.  

Peak power at the wheels of 595 hp was recorded at 6600 rpm. The peak here was amongst some noise in the data that was present in all runs, so go ahead and mentally scribe a line through the peaks and valleys if you like. There were a couple of runs that eked out a bit more peak power. As always, the run shown here is a statistical average that I compute using a pair of organic ocular sensors and an elaborate posterior-scratching process.

And as always, the run displayed here entailed a fully-warmed -- but not heat-soaked -- engine, obtained with a cooldown period between runs. Speaking of dyno runs, judging by the engine note this mill is a mite pissed-off, even more so than the 2010 GT500 we dyno-tested.

Full disclosure: we didn't fill this car's fuel tank ourselves, as the GT500 came straight from Ford's local vehicle prep company immediately prior to our test (they gave it fresh tires and brake pads after Dan's roadtrip). We can only assume there was the usual local "premium" 91 octane in the tank, but it's a pretty safe assumption. 

Here's a fun one. Below is a dyno chart of the GT500 and our longterm 2011 Mustang GT 5.0. Think the latter is strong? Consider this:

When the GT500 is generating its peak torque of 603 lb-ft, the 5.0 is piddling out 330 lb-ft, or a bit more than half that of the GT500.