The boldest, most powerful factory-built Ford Mustang ever – the eagerly awaited 2007 Shelby GT500 – is taking to the streets of America this summer, making stops in 16 different cities.

The cross-country tour of the Shelby GT500 is a giant step toward winning the hearts and minds of American drivers. Shelby-inspired vehicles have a long history with Ford and the new Shelby GT500 is hitting streets to showcase this ultimate expression of a Bold Move.

“The spirit of the new Shelby GT500 exemplifies our desire to aggressively design vehicles that excite and entice new customers, expand our image and pave our way forward,” says Mark Fields, Ford Motor Company Executive Vice President and President of the Americas. “Across our product line, you will see bold vehicles and technologies that will take back the American road.”

With a 500-horsepower, 5.4-liter supercharged V-8 engine, the Shelby GT500 is the most powerful factory-built Mustang ever. A modern interpretation of the Shelby Mustang of the 1960s, the new GT500 uses advanced engineering to attain the performance that made the original GT500 the king of the road. True to the original GT500, it will be available both as a coupe and as a convertible when it starts reaching dealer showrooms in July.

The Ford Shelby GT500 starts with Mustang’s solid underpinnings. The Mustang was designed from the beginning with performance derivatives in mind, providing an exceptionally rigid, well-engineered starting point for GT500 chassis engineers, who retuned and upgraded key chassis components.

Named after racing legend Carroll Shelby who collaborated with Ford on this and other storied Mustang models dating back to 1965, the 2007 version is by far the most attainable vehicle in the elite and exclusive 500-horsepower club – the world’s most powerful production cars.

Working with Ford Special Vehicle Team (SVT) engineers, iconic racing legend Carroll Shelby was instrumental in the development of the new GT500. “It’s perfect,” says Shelby. “I wouldn’t change a thing. It is everything I expected a modern Shelby Mustang to be.”

The GT500 was ranked as the most buzz-worthy new-vehicle nameplate among sporty car considerers in a Kelley Blue Book Marketing Research survey taken a full year before this summer’s introduction. “The two names ‘Mustang’ and ‘Shelby’ are magic to a wide variety of buyers,” says Jack R. Nerad, executive editorial director and market analyst for Kelley Blue Book/kbb.com. “There has been a great deal of buzz around the most recent combination of those two names, especially among Hispanics and performance-oriented drivers.”

The Shelby GT500 tour kicks off June 8 through 10 in Tulsa, Okla., at the 32nd Annual Mid-America Ford Performance & Shelby Meet. The new Shelby Mustang will then travel to Charlotte, N.C.; Kansas City, MO; Danville, Va.; Tampa, Fla.; Boston; Fort Worth, Texas and Birmingham, Al., among other locations. It will conclude at the end of September in Las Vegas. The schedule for the tour is subject to change and vehicle event availability.

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