Learn about the 2010 Ford Shelby GT500
Behind me is the Ford GT500, the ultimate Mustang, the car that was meant to compete
with Camaro Z28. Of course they’re not going to build -- this one is looking like the king
of the pony hill. We’re about to find out.
Visually, the Shelby GT500 starts off with a 2010 Mustang styling upgrade but the front
and rear appearance are unique, the headlights, the aluminum power dome hood and the
grill intake are all new. Many of those changes visually are functional as well. The chin
splitter helps add a little bit of down force or reduce lift in the front and the wing in the
back with the gurney lip spoiler reduces the rear down force or eliminates lift slightly so
that the center of aerodynamic pressure is closer to the CG of the car so it feels the same
at high speed as it does at low.
Of course under the hood, we got a 540 horsepower, 510 pound feet. It’s basically last
year’s KR engine but with a number of unique twists, a new air intake for example and
knock centers have been added, which allows them to make a more aggressive spark
curve so that actually the torque curve is a little bit broader below the peak.
Of course the big news is the handling. This car has had a lot of changes to the springs
and dampers and so forth, trying to put the difference between the really hard-edged KR
of last year and the baseline GT500 which some felt was a little bit too soft. We’re about
to go out on the road and find out if the changes made a difference.
I say that the day driving the new 2010 Shelby GT500 that I’m pretty impressed. You
know my last experience with one of these cars was the GT500 KR, the $80,000.00 one
that we had in our best handling test and we didn’t care for that one too much. The ride
quality was very harsh, the steering wasn’t very good, not very communicative, kind of
slow, especially in that classic car race. And today I find that -- though this was really
kind of a minor update, they didn’t totally redo the body structure or anything, huge leap
forward have been made. The spring rates, the damping rates have all been changed and I
think the ride is more subtle even though some of those rates actually went up, but of
course it’s a whole package. There’s a brand new tire, an Eagle F1 super car tire tuned
specifically for this car, unique, unlike all of the other super car tires out there.
Altogether, the steering is very direct. I think it is quicker, feels quicker than before, not a
lot of communication. We still got almost a 2-ton car, 58% of the weight over the front
wheels and they’re fat tires. So you do not get the little nuances of grip at the road and
how much of the friction circle we’re using that you might get in an M3. That said
though, it is easy to place this car right where you want it on the road even though it is
kind of wide, some of that narrower stretches of highway wanted a -- seemed a little big
for the road. But the brakes are also quite easy to modulate, you can get exactly the
amount of braking you want out there, nice Brembo 4-pad brakes in front and special
compounds for the GT500, very impressed with that as well.
The sound this thing makes is very nice. They’ve done a good job, they got a unique
patented resonator that kind of cuts out most of the supercharger whine, just a little bit
left, funny that the noise is coming through. I really like the Mustang GT now as well.
This is different from that but with also quite steering and quite nice. Obviously 540
horsepower, 510 pound feet of torque are always there at the ready and it’s an awful lot
of fun to drive around on these roads when they’re empty with all that on your hood.
We’re here at Northern California’s Infineon Raceway at the press launch of the Shelby
GT500. We’re going to try and improve on some of our test numbers because the surface
we tested on in Dearborn, Michigan was very cold and these tires don’t like that. We’ll
see if it does it any better here.
In our acceleration test, the GT500 advanced from 0 to 60 in 4.7 seconds. It completed
the quarter mile in just 12.7 seconds at 118.1 miles per hour. In our braking test, the
Mustang stopped from 60 miles per hour in just 109 feet.
It completed our figure 8 course in 25.1 seconds at an average lateral G of 0.81. Its
maximum lateral acceleration was 0.96 G.
So there you have it, at least at this point in 2010, until they bring out a Z28 Camaro,
Ford’s Shelby GT500 appears to be the king of the pony muscle car hill.
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