You'll find the rarest things on Brad Sokoly's horse farm, and none of them are horses. On Feb. 22, they rolled into town by the dozens, bellowing the kind of rip-your-head-off horsepower that melts tires and chars blacktop. 

 

Sixteen thousand horsepower doesn't find itself in one place very often, but for one weekend a year, it's in Sokoly's front yard, Shelby Mustangs gleaming in all the colors of the muscle-car rainbow, all show-shined and ready for a spotlight.

 

"You can see this is a cult following," Sokoly said. "People come a long way for this." 

 

Visitors to the third annual show lit up the rollers on the dyno, lit bonfires in the yard and reveled in the sight of what in their eyes are the greatest cars in the world. 

 

Vic Shemwell's demonic black creation may be greater than most, having just spun 734 horsepower through its rear wheels, snorting force-fed air through a 3-foot-wide intake that spans the width of its equally black hood. Ask the horsepower-addicted retiree how much he's spent on it and you'll hear "too much." 

 

The grin across his face says it may have been just enough. 

 

Face-stretching smiles from the roar of a well-tuned V8 spinning its wheels while standing still come courtesy of a mobile dynamometer — a trailer-mounted horsepower measuring device where a car is strapped down on top of a giant steel roller, shifted into fourth gear, and accelerated to redline and back again. Then you've got a horsepower number. Shemwell's car may have won that contest, but half the cars in Sokoly's yard have crested 400 horses. 

 

But these special pony cars are all the same in Sokoly's eyes. He's just glad they came in the first place. As of a month ago, the event wasn't happening, after scheduling conflicts with the specialty carmaker's public relations department at Team Shelby backed out of plans for a much larger gathering at another location. Sokoly had to scramble to put together his show in time to get any visitors. 

 

"We don't have the record amount of cars we had last year, but even if we had 10 cars I'd call this a success," Sokoly said. 

 

This year he saw 46 of the snake-badged rolling nostalgia cram onto his farm. Last year it was 90. But he's not counting the oddball Ferrari or two that stop by for a peek. 

 

"I don't care what kind of horsepower it is, I just love horsepower," Sokoly said. 

 

But what really caught his eye was the one of a kind Saleen Mustang blinding passersby with its arctic white paint in the bright hot sun. 

 

The back of Rodney Fleetwood's shirt looks like a horse on steroids. It's no wonder he brought more than 500hp to the show. But his one-off car brought a lot more questions than just raw numbers. Performance carmaker Saleen only had the prototype built before lawsuits shut them down. Fleetwood brought it all the way from Louisiana to show it off. 

 

"There are a lot of questions about it, because nobody's ever seen one," Fleetwood said.

 

As the day wound down and the horses stampeded out of the yard, Sokoly raced out the door every 30 seconds to say goodbye to another friend. He hopes to bring back even more next year, all united by a love of a unique brand of horsepower. 

 

"The camaraderie here is amazing," he said. "It's all for the love of the cars."