With its Pep Boys-inspired rear wing, fancy stick-on graphics, and a growlingly means-business exhaust note, the King of All Mustangs does not just show up — it sort of presents itself. Its appearance should be accompanied by a "ta-da!"

Such as, "Ta-da! There it is rounding Turn Three!" And "Ta-da! Now it’s coming into the pits!"

Ford would like to sell you one. "Ta-da! Thanks for your $225,000! Please enjoy your new full-race, 550-hp Mustang."

Your first question is, of course, "Can I drive it on the street?" The answer: If you live in Hazzard County, maybe.

The list of available-to-the-public hot Mustangs, already lengthy with efforts by Ford’s own SVT and tuners such as Shelby, Roush, Steeda, and Saleen, grows by one with the pending addition of the King of All Mustangs, which comes from an unlikely source: Ford’s own racing division, which turned to Multimatic Motorsports, a Canadian performance company, to complete the project. The naturally aspirated engine comes from Roush-Yates, the NASCAR boys. The inspiration and the initial investment come from Dan Davis, director of Ford Racing Technology.

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The 2010 V-6 Mustang may have been redesigned, but its specific output makes it seem like a relic. In this segment, both the Chevrolet Camaro and the Hyundai Genesis coupe offer V-6s of smaller displacement that nevertheless make more horsepower and more torque. Chevy gets 304 horsepower and 273 pound-feet from 3.6 liters; Hyundai gets 306 and 266 from 3.8. The Ford manages only 210 horses and 240 pound-feet from 4.0 liters.

That may be because the Mustang’s V-6 dates from the first Bush administration. Ford reengineered the six in 1997, switching the valvetrain from pushrods to overhead cams. The output was, and has been, 210 horsepower. In 13 years, don’t you think Ford should have been able to find—we don’t know—10 more ponies?

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It’s a new day and we all know what that means! Yet another post about the Mustang. Most of us here at Autoblog are unabashed Mustang fans. So when the call comes from Dearborn to drive yet another new Mustang, we invariably set about rearranging schedules. Such was the case last week. No sooner had we returned to frost-bitten Detroit after the LA Auto Show than the call came to return to SoCal. It was time to take the 2010 Mustang off the LA Convention Center stand and out into what passes for the real world in these parts.

Before we hopped into the updated Mustangs, Ford wanted to give us a refresher on what was being left behind. We were supplied with 2009 models to drive from our hotel to the staging area in Malibu. Anyone who has ever spent time in a 2005-09 Mustang is immediately aware that the weak link is its interior. In a word, it looked and felt cheap. The order of the day for the new 2010 model is refinement. Find out after the jump if Ford has made a Mustang worthy of competing in the now crowded class of modern day muscle cars.

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Spy shots of future versions of the Ford Mustang are hot properties, no matter what trim level or body style they reveal. And so we struck gold when our spies captured the new 2010 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500 convertible—among the fastest, most desirable, and most collectible of all Mustangs—strutting its stuff outside Ford’s Dearborn headquarters several months before any Mustang is to be shown to the public.

Even better, this working prototype is wearing virtually no disguise other than its charred-Cheetos-on-a-white-tablecloth body wrap—complete with racing stripes, of course—revealing design details we’ve never seen before that will apply to all Mustangs. These include the new, shrunken headlamps, which are now assemblies that include the turn signals. The back end shows the pinched taillamps set high up in the new rear bumper. The freshened skin is somewhat more beveled, with a front-to-back crease and what appears to be some sort of front fender ornamentation. Read more »