C8 Corvette Takes on Shelby GT500 in Battle of the Stars and Stripes

Mega-popular YouTuber Shmee takes his GT500 to Hennessey Performance to battle a C8 Corvette.

If there’s one comparison that’s been beaten to death in recent months, it’s people pitting the C8 Corvette against the Ford Mustang Shelby GT500. But it’s easy to see why – as far as American sports/muscle/pony cars go, these two are the best at what they were built to do, for now anyway. And this latest showdown between C8 Corvette and Shelby GT500, brought to us by mega-popular YouTuber Shmee– or Tim Burton, as he’s otherwise known – is a bit different than most.

Burton is famous for traveling the world to find interesting automotive content, and his latest travels have taken him all across America in a Shelby GT500. Most recently, he visited Hennessey Performance in Texas, which is where he took the time to line his Mustang up against a C8 Corvette convertible.

As you’re probably already saying to yourself, this isn’t the fairest comparison on paper. The convertible weighs a bit more than the coupe, but it’s still considerably lighter than the portly GT500. But it needs that weight advantage to make up for its power disadvantage. The C8, of course, offers up 495 horsepower from its 6.2-liter LT2 V8, while the Shelby’s supercharged 5.2-liter Predator V8 makes a healthy 760 horsepower.

The first of three races goes pretty much exactly how you’d expect, with the C8 leaping off the line to an early lead before the GT500 uses its horsepower advantage to catch up at the end. “Wow, that’s uh 760 horsepower for you,” Burton says. “But it’s incredibly impressive how quickly that Corvette gets off the line. The weight over the back gets the traction.”

Race two starts off pretty much the same way, but the GT500 bogs off the line and gives up an even bigger initial gap. That proves too large a deficit to make up, and the Corvette takes an easy win. So for the third and final race, Burton turns down the RPM on his launch control to see if he can find some traction. That works wonders as the Shelby hooks this time, but the race is still quite close with the Mustang coming through in the end.

None of this comes as any sort of surprise, really, but it’s still notable. The C8 once again punches above its weight class in terms of power to performance, and it proves that it doesn’t really matter how much horsepower you have under the hood – what really matters is if you can get it to the ground. And the mid-engine marvel does as good a job as any car at that.

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