Shelby will soon have something to celebrate: the company will be allowed to blow out 60 candles next year. To celebrate that milestone, Shelby is launching a new Mustang GT500KR. ‘Intense’ seems an understatement in this variant.
The letters ‘KR’ behind ‘GT500’ are not completely unknown. The letters stand for ‘King of the Road’ and first appeared on the Shelby GT500 in 1968. In 2008, Shelby re-released the GT500KR, the fastest production Mustang ever with 540 hp at the time. The cream of the crop in Mustang territory is now returning. Since the ‘regular’ Shelby GT500 already unleashes 770 horsepower on its rear wheels and the Signature Edition unveiled last year has 811 horsepower of supercharger muscle, the bar was set high for the KR. With an output of ‘more than 900 horsepower’ (912 hp), however, it is well at the top of the pecking order. He draws that power from a 5.2-liter V8 with a whopping 3.8-liter supercharger. Only tuner Hennessey manages to surpass that number.
Shelby also mounts an improved cooling system for the huge supercharger and the KR also gets a cat-back exhaust system from Borla. In addition, the drive shaft has also been reinforced to be able to master the enormous bonk primal power from the V8. In appearance, the GT500KR does not even differ that much from the standard GT500. The exhaust system is more extreme and the spoiler is a kind of large ‘Gurney flap’, in contrast to the more traditional spoiler of the GT500. The KR also gets a carbon fiber hood and special wheels. To make sure there is no doubt to the outside world that you are driving the most powerful street-legal Shelby ever, the KR letters are in the striping on the sides.
Shelby GT500KR
Shelby will only build 225 copies of the new Shelby GT500KR for model year 2022. As a GT500 owner, you can also have the KR kit retrofitted to your Mustang, but Shelby only offers 60 of those conversions. The GT500KR should yield in the United States converted €113,063. That is a considerable additional cost compared to the regular GT500, which is in the showroom for €64,446 converted. Incidentally, the conversion from a GT500 to a KR with a converted price of €48,617 is not much cheaper. In the Netherlands, of course, we do not have to count on the arrival of the KR.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl