Shelby Super Snake Prudhomme Edition: The Snake & the Snakecharmer Do a Mustang
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"I pulled $12,000 out of my ass to sponsor Prudhomme, because I felt he really had it. I knew he was going to be great. That was 42 years ago, and we've been friends ever since." -- Carroll Shelby "He was sitting there in a cool-looking blue Lincoln, with a really pretty girl in the car wearing a short skirt, and they were drinking beer and I thought to myself, 'Carroll Shelby is the coolest sumbiatch I ever met.' -- Don "The Snake" Prudhomme  In 1968, a young Don Prudhomme was driving a Ford SOHC 427-powered rail dragster. Ford was behind the effort, in an attempt to take on the mighty Mopar Street Hemi. Carroll Shelby was still building Cobras and Mustangs, and Shelby American was managing all sorts of racing efforts for Ford. That's how he and The Snake first connected. But they never, in all those years, worked together on a car. Until now.  Meet the Prudhomme Edition Shelby Super Snake, a Mustang built to live life a quarter mile at a time, with the philosophy that none of those quarter miles should take more than 10 seconds. I just came back from a gig at the Wally Parks NHRA Museum at the Pomona Fairplex where the car was revealed to the media, Shelby fans, and other assembled drag racing folks.  The car was conceived, designed, and will be built at Shelby Automobiles' facility in Las Vegas. It's a strictly "post-title" program, meaning you show up with your 2007 or 2008 Shelby GT500, fork over $100 grand, and they'll convert it to a Prudhomme edition car for you. Or pay $50K more, and they'll source a GT500 for you and do the same. Just don't expect to buy or lease one at a Ford dealer. The modifications are extensive and focused on making this Mustang work best in a straight line, a decided departure from the usual Shelby mix of accel, braking, and handling aimed at road course or twisty mountain road work. The centerpiece, of course, is the engine, still supercharged and cranked up to produce 800 hp (109-octane race gas and racing tune) or a mere 750 on 93-octane juice with a street tune. Either way, show up to the track, bolt on your slicks, uncork the mufflers, and bracket race your heart out. The scooped intake system that sits atop the huffer is just the coolest thing. And unlike Ford Racing's Cobra Jet supe-stock-style Mustang (50 built, all sold out), the Shelby Super Snake quarter-miler is street legal, although we wonder what happens when you show up at the smog station...  Several other drag-racing legends were in attendance, including Ed "The Ace" McCulloch, plus current competitors Ashley and (dad) John Force, there for the NHRA season-opening Winternationals. The elder Force looks fit and sharp, amazing after the life-threatening accident he suffered a little more than a year ago.
Is there demand for 100 of these limited-edition straight-line Shelbys? It's curious that this car came to fruition at the same time as did the Ford's factory Cobra Jet, although again, those are all spoken for. And the current economic climate might not be right for a $150,000 bracket racer. Time will tell.     http://www.shelbyautos.com/; 702/942-7325 |
Pony Tail: Inside the Coolest Turn Signals Since the '60s
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Hey Washington Beltway bellyachers, check out this Detroit-Three innovation: Signal to turn in a new 2010 Mustang, and the tail lamps illuminate sequentially to point the way the car is turning, one-two-three from the inside to the outside. Oh, I know most of you are plenty old enough to remember the Thelma-n-Louise T-bird that launched this idea in 1965, and the '67 Mercury Cougar, '68 Shelby Mustang, and '69 Imperial that followed. But unlike those 1965-1968 versions, these involve no motors, rotating contacts, or moving parts to wear out. And get this, greenies: These new ones save fuel.
Okay, the sequential blinking doesn't save anything noticeable, but the LED lamps that are flashing (and serving tail-lamp and brake-light duty) consume 87 percent less power than the incandescent bulbs they replace. This helps save 10.5 gallons of gas per year in the typical Mustang, according to Osram, the folks who produce the system and that pioneered myriad other lighting innovations on earlier Ford/Lincoln-Mercury products. More good news: Unlike most LED signal and tail lamps you're aware of, which position an array of LEDs behind some sort of lens in a custom fitting for a particular car, the Mustang's LEDs work very much like a traditional incandescent bulb.
They're bulb-shaped, so they fit into a traditional lens and reflector housing with a push-and-turn base, drastically reducing the replacement cost of the tail lamp after crash damage (costing about half as much). They typically last the life of a vehicle and are unaffected by shock and vibration, so they're ideal in extreme applications (Pratt & Miller has used Joule lamps for three seasons of Corvette endurance racing without a failure).These so-called Joule lamps incorporate the LEDs, the thermal management (that ring sitting just behind the reflector housing), and the control circuitry (which resides in the connector).
Joule lamps cannot replace incandescent bulbs in existing applications (at least not yet), but this plug-n-play approach allows manufacturers to work LEDs into their product lines for vastly less investment cost than all those custom applications you see out there, which is why Chevy can afford to have an LED fitment on only the LTZ model of the Malibu. Joule lamps are also in use on the Ford Taurus X and the Mercury Mountaineer and Sable.
The Mustang's other Osram lighting flourish is found inside, where the MyColor dash gauge backlight color is now keyed with the rest of the interior ambient lighting, so that when you dial up ghoulish green or whorehouse red on the dash, the footwells, cupholders, etc. all glow with the flow.
