At the end of November proud owners finally took delivery of the long-awaited Shelby GT350, the “most capable” track-focused Mustang in Ford’s history. Sporting a suite of supporting performance technologies like the MagneRide suspension and Carbon Fiber wheels, the Shelby GT350 brings a lot of firsts to the Ford Mustang.
Yet it’s inarguable that the most attractive figure of the latest and greatest Shelby is its 5.2 liter Voodoo V8 engine, a naturally-aspirated monster that Ford rates at 526 horsepower and 429 lb-ft of torque. But do the ratings lie? Hennessey strapped a stock Shelby GT350 to the dyno, and the results seem to indicate a serious under-rating of Ford’s deep-breathing Voodoo engine. With a RPM redline of 8,200 and producing more power than many engines with forced induction, you can really hear this beast scream on the dyno. While we’d surely rather see it roaring down a race track, the dyno reveals some surprising results about the new Shelby.
When the dyno run comes to an end, the Shelby GT350 put 482 horsepower and 407 lb-ft of torque down to the wheels. This suggests that Ford underrated the 5.2 liter mill, as a 15 percent drivetrain loss from the stock figures should put the GT350 in the area of 450 horsepower and and 365 lb-ft of torque. The discrepancy in the torque figure is especially glaring, as these numbers suggest a figure of over 490 lb-ft compared to the stock 429 rating.
Now we think it’s worth mentioning that this engine almost certainly hasn’t been “broken in” yet, which could lead to different dyno numbers. We also don’t know what gear Hennessey dyno’d the car in. Or maybe Ford kept the horsepower rating purposefully low. Why? We couldn’t say, but this math just doesn’t seem to add up in this case.