Back in February of this year at the Chicago Auto Show we caught Jamal Hameedi, the SVT chief nameplate engineer, taking a quick look at the Camaro ZL1 at the Chevrolet booth. We began talking about what SVT had in store for the future to combat the ZL1, and while Hameedi wouldn’t give us specific details, he did say that they had something special planned.
Fast forward nine months and we’re talking with Hameedi once again, this time in Los Angeles at the 2013 Mustang reveal party both admiring the new 650 horsepower 2013 Shelby GT500. This time he’s able to talk more about the GT500 and gave us a couple very cool details regarding the performance testing done with the car.
First, we were hoping that Ford would have some lap times from the Nürburgring after doing extensive testing there. Unfortunately that’s not the case, as Hameedi says that SVT was simply doing suspension tuning at the track and wasn’t completing laps for times. We have no doubt the times will be impressive if Ford ever decides to take the GT500 back to the ‘ring.
Second, much has been made of the 2013 GT500′s mph top speed, and obviously any Mustang that can top the magical 200 mph barrier is impressive. We asked Hameedi if they had ever gone for a top speed run or if the number was simply an estimate, and he said that they had done high speed testing at the Nardo Ring in Italy earlier this year. “There’s plenty of places to hit 180 mph in the U.S. but not many places to go 200 mph,” he told us. So what was the result of the testing? Hameedi says that SVT recorded a top speed of 202 mph in the 2013 Shelby GT500, the result of a combination of the extra power from the supercharged 5.8-liter V8 and improved aerodynamics. So there you have it – the official top speed of the 2013 Shelby GT500 is 202 mph.
