ford mustang shelby gt500

First off, I know movie cars are supposed to be fake. That's the whole point. But so much of this car was sold to me as less fake, that when I saw all the fake, I wanted to tell all of you about the fake. Fakey fake fake.

When I posted about this car earlier, I mentioned it had a surprising 900 HP. I remember thinking as I read the press release that that seemed weird, since in a movie you can have a 50 HP car look like it has 500 HP. I've seen the Herbie movies, I know the drill.The reason I thought Ford and the studio went sort of nuts and made a 900 HP car was because, well, that's what they told me:

A hero car needs a hero engine, so this Mustang has been fit with a 900-horsepower all-aluminum supercharged 5.8-liter V8 modified by Ford Racing.The Ford-designed and created made-for-movie Mustang will be featured prominently throughout the film and become part of the mythology of the movie. The “Need for Speed” Mustang features a custom-designed wide body, unique 22-inch alloy wheels, and larger air intakes to feed the supercharged V8 engine under its classic Mustang twin-nostril hood.

So, that's why I'm pointing this out. If it's fake, fine, I can take it, I'm a big boy, doing my own taxes and all that. When I asked them about this, they said they were real "for the character" of the car in the movie. Which, sure, I get, but I think that could have been made clear in the PR. It's not like I'm trying to interview KITT off set here and find out what kind of tree he would want to be, I just wanted to know if the damn car really has 900 HP.

To their credit, it was Ford's press folks who told me the car didn't really have 900 HP, and that number was what the car had in the world of the movie. They did say it had the 5.8 L motor with a supercharger, but they declined to let us look under the hood because, I was told, there was something in there that would give away part of the plot to the movie.

Maybe it was a fake severed Michael Keaton head? A magic alien hyper-hamster running in a boost wheel setup? Or maybe it was just a stock Mustang engine, which would be all you'd actually need in such a movie car, really.