Shelby GT500 Super Snake

In 1967 Goodyear needed a demonstration. Shelby needed a headline. The two requirements met at a proving ground in San Angelo, Texas, in the form of a GT500 fitted with a racing 427 and driven for five hundred miles at an average speed that comfortably exceeded anything a road-going Mustang had any business sustaining, on tyres that were the actual point of the exercise.

It worked. The tyres survived. Shelby proposed a production run of fifty. The costing came back at something close to double the price of a standard GT500, at which point the dealers stopped returning calls and the run of fifty became a run of one.

That single car has since become one of the most valuable Mustangs in existence, changing hands for seven figures. It is a useful reminder that the market does not price performance; it prices scarcity, and scarcity is usually the residue of a failed business plan.

The name was revived in 2007 and has been applied ever since to a series of upgraded modern Mustangs built by Shelby American. These are genuinely fast and genuinely made by the company whose name is on them, and the Ophidiary declines to be snobbish about it. Species radiate. That is what species do. There was one Super Snake for forty years and then suddenly there was a population, and the fact that the population is descended from a marketing decision rather than a Texas tyre test does not make its scales any less real.