The Shelby name doesn’t come cheap. Vintage Shelby Mustangs and Cobras can instruction six or sometimes even seven figure sums. The current Shelby offerings are much cheaper – the GT350 is priced around $ 70,000 while the Ford-built GT500 is a little less expensive with a base price just short of $ 50,000 – although we still wouldn’t consider them attainable to the medium guy with a mortgage and 2.5 kids.

Shelby sees that as a problem. The majority of its customers are the people who craved a GT500 or Cobra back when they were kids in the 1960s. Those customers are getting older, and like many other automakers, Shelby has decided to reach out to younger buyers. At the New York Auto Show earlier this year, Shelby proclaimed the GTS, a new model designed to be attainable to the masses. The GTS would be useable in the two V6 and V8 form and, with a package price of $ 9,995, could be had for less than $ 33,000 in base form. “It’s a car that reaches a younger buyer while acknowledging the economic realities of our times,” said Shelby American president John Luft at the time.

We have to wonder, though. Are younger buyers interested in purchasing a Shelby Mustang? Will people actually purchase a Shelby with a V6? We aimed to find out for ourselves and picked up a V6 model in Race Red with White Le Mans stripes at Shelby’s facility in Gardena, CA for a week-long test.