Here’s How The Ford Mustang Shelby GT350, GT500 Model Names Came To Be
In the automotive world, sometimes it’s easy to trace the lineage of certain model names, while other times they remain a bit of a mystery. The latter certainly applies to the Ford Mustang Shelby GT350 and GT500 model names, at least in part. We all know that Shelby comes from Carroll Shelby’s name, and that GT stands for “Grand Tourer,” or a sports car designed for high speed and long-distance driving, But what about the 350 and 500 portions of those model names?
“Here’s how the nomenclature came to be. Carrol Shelby told Lee Iococa: a car makes a name, a name doesn’t make a car,” Mustang brand manager, Jim Owens, told Ford Authority executive editor, Alex Luft, in a recent interview. “So he had his shop foreman walk from the corner of the Shelby building to the LAX property line and count out the steps. That was 347 steps. So that’s when they decided that they’d call it a GT350.”
“So when it came back as a bigger, more powerful vehicle, they wanted to give it a higher number — GT500,” Owens continued. “It wasn’t horsepower, it wasn’t displacement, it wasn’t cubic feet per second or per minute, it was really just something above the GT350 because Caroll thought that the car would make the name, not the name that would make the car.”
