What happened to the last ever muscle car designed by Carroll Shelby?

The last custom car built by the late, great Carroll Shelby was a one-off GT500 Super Snake made specially for the Need for Speed video game.

Few people have had as big an impact on US muscle cars as Shelby.

Born in Texas in 1923, Shelby began driving professionally when he was 29 years old and became a winning co-driver at the 1959 24 Hours of Le Mans, driving an Aston Martin DBR1 with Roy Salvadori.

After retiring from racing, Shelby turned his attention towards car design – and aren’t we all glad he did?

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The Shelby GT500 was made for EA Games

Shelby was responsible for creating some of the most iconic muscle cars of all time, including the Shelby GT350 and the one-off prototype dubbed Little Red that vanished for years.

He even created the ‘meanest’ and ‘scariest’ muscle car ever, which he held onto in his personal collection.

In 2011, Electronic Arts, the creators of the Need for Speed game franchise, reached out to Shelby to work on a one-off custom GT500 Super Snake.

The plan was for the custom-build to appear on the cover of Need for Speed: Run and travel around the world to promote the upcoming release before later being auctioned off to raise cash for the Carroll Shelby Foundation.

The supercharged 2011 Mustang Shelby GT500 Super Snake came with a 5.4 liter V8 that could produce a 750 horsepower and an upgraded one-piece aluminium driveshaft.

The Super Snake could do 0-60mph in nippy 4.1 seconds.

The stunning car was finished in Wimbledon White with custom Charcoal stripes and came with a Ford Racing handling pack, which included lowering springs, dynamic dampers, and a front strut tower brace.

It also had a revised bumper and exclusive badges.

The car vanished for a few years

All in all, it looked absolutely beautiful – and very much befitting of the cover of a racing video game.

The custom job was finished just months before Shelby died in May 2012, aged 89.

So the decision was made to put the original planned auction on hold as a mark of respect.

It eventually went up for sale in 2015 with a starting bid of $125,000 and a listing that hailed the car as ‘the last specialty custom car bult by Carroll Shelby’.

However, in a further twist to the tale – the car then disappeared for several years, before it turned up on an online auction site in 2022 looking a little worse for wear.

The car’s front splitter was scratched, its paint work was peeling, and there were some cracks to the front bumper, while an additional 1,500 miles had to be added to the clock.

The car didn’t garner much attention and with the final bid reaching just $77,000 it went unsold.

A sad end for a pretty spectacular car.