The company that the immortal Carroll Shelby founded has a long history of doing crazy things with Fords (and, we know, Chrysler products, too, at least for a while). You can get yourself a bucking hunk of Mustang from these people, with more than enough horsepower to hurrah any highway hoon. The concept of a performance truck isn’t exactly new – you may recall the Ford F-150 Lightning, or the Chevrolet C1500 SS454 that came along around the same time – but what Shelby American is doing now is absolutely beyond the pale. The historic performance purveyor has announced that it will make 250 copies of its new Shelby F-150 Super Snake Sport available through Ford dealers. We’ll get to the particulars in a moment, but for openers, Shelby American is flatly saying this is the fastest street-legal truck available for sale anywhere, or at least at a Ford dealership.
The crowd went nuts when this beast made its first appearance last month at the SEMA show in Las Vegas. Lots of manufacturers are hitting big output numbers with their performance vehicles, but this is outrageous: Its 5.0-liter Ford V-8 is topped with a pulley-driven, powder-coated Roots-type supercharger that nearly doubles the engine’s normal capability to 770hp. Remember, that’s from 302 cubic inches. The blower is fed by functional cold-air scoops on the truck’s hood. The Super Snake Sport exhales through a Borla exhaust system, and all that momentum is stopped by Shelby-spec Baer brakes. Factory testing revealed a 0-60 time of 3.45 seconds and 0-100 MPH in 8.3. Honest, we’re not making this up. If you want the fully supercharged engine, be ready to part with $93,385. Even at this price, the trucks are a certainty to be snapped up fast by eager collectors.
Jim Donnelly On Wheels 