850HP Ford Shelby GT500 SVT from HELL!!

While it’s certainly an amazing time to be a car enthusiast, the modern Golden Age of Hotrodding is also a bit of a double edged sword. With completely streetable cars regularly putting down well over 1,000 horsepower on the dyno, a lot of very impressive cars tend to get overlooked if they don’t top the quadruple-digit horsepower number, and that’s not really fair.

To put things in perspective, fifteen years ago a daily driven car making 500 horsepower to the wheels could quite literally outrun just about everything else on the road and would be competitive on the track against other daily driven cars. Of course, it also took a good bit of modification to hit that number at the wheels when 340 crank horsepower was just about the highest thing available from the factory. Today, you can buy several cars from multiple automakers that make well over 500 horsepower at the wheels in completely stock form, and you can do something as simple as swap the pulley on a stock supercharged powerplant and tune it and push that number well over 700. It really is a great time to be a car guy.

A perfect example of a car that really doesn’t have much done in the way of mods yet still cranks out a ton of power is this Shelby GT500. With little more than a pulley swap, exhaust and tune, this very unassuming – well, as unassuming as a GT500 can be anyway – is putting down 850 horsepower to the wheels and sounds amazing while doing it. The unmistakeable whine of the blower is downright wicked as the car approached under full throttle and the exhaust is snarly and loud as the car passes by and leaves the scene in a hurry.

You could walk into a dealership, buy this car and have these mods completed in the same day if you know the right people, proving yet again that this is possibly the best era ever for gearheads to be alive!