Only a handful of cars in history ever left a Dodge factory wearing both a towering rear wing and a 426 Hemi under the hood, and Tom Lembeck owns one of them. The Charger Daytona was not built to look fast at a car show; it was built because Dodge was losing on Sunday and needed something drastic. Read on to find out what Dodge was really trying to prove, and why so few Hemi versions exist.
A black and gold Pontiac Firebird Trans Am built in the image of Smokey and the Bandit sold for $275,000 at Barrett-Jackson in Scottsdale, and Burt Reynolds drove it onto the block himself. It was not the first one he sold, and it was nowhere near the last. The car underneath the paint had almost nothing in common with a 1977 Trans Am. Read on for what buyers were really paying for.
Yenko’s name has not meant much on a new car in decades, but a modern stroker build on the Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport just brought it roaring back. With a supercharged 6.8-liter making roughly 800 horsepower, wrapped in Grand Sport hardware and genuine Yenko styling cues, only fifty of these were ever built. Read on to find out what’s actually under the skin.
David Freiburger’s 1970 Dodge Super Bee sat filthy in a barn for 36 years before he finally rescued the exact car he’d been chasing since he was a teenager. In this installment, decades of accumulated grime finally comes off before reassembly around a budget 440 he already built and dyno-tested. Watch to see just how much thirty-six years of neglect really left behind.
A 25,444-mile odometer reading sounds impossible for a car built in 1973, but this single-family-owned Monte Carlo backs it up with genuine, untouched originality. Chevrolet’s award-winning personal luxury coupe set sales records that year, and this example shows exactly what one looked like before five decades of wear ever had a chance to happen. Read on to find out what makes a true survivor different from a great restoration.
This is the third of just twenty-five prototypes Oldsmobile built ahead of the officially revived 1972 Hurst/Olds, which would go on to pace the Indianapolis 500. The original Hurst/Olds partnership debuted in 1968 before going dormant for two full years, and 1971 also marked the last year Oldsmobile sold the 442 as its own standalone model. The Rocket 350 V8 under this car’s hood carried the same engineering that would define the production Hurst/Olds cars buyers could purchase in 1972.
Lou Costabile’s My Car Story visits PHP Race Engines Shop in Wauconda, Illinois, to capture a rare 1966 Ford GT40 in yellow, and the video makes a point of emphasizing that this is a genuine example, not one of the countless replicas the GT40’s shape has inspired over the decades. The car’s small-block V8 takes center stage as the real focus. Watch to hear exactly what a real GT40 sounds like, straight from the Le Mans-winning model year of 1966.
Hudsons Rod and Customs is refreshing a 1957 Chevrolet pickup that already wears the shop’s own logo, a client’s truck serving double duty as a rolling advertisement. An LS swap is planned for reliability, while a temporary Cadillac-sourced leather interior holds things over until a fully custom cabin gets built. Watch to see what a custom shop chooses to change on its own showcase vehicle.
Troy LaCrone made his name with a nitrous small-block 1971 Camaro that ran 9.19 at over 140 mph while still riding on leaf springs and slapper bars, a car that looked eight seconds slower than it was. Asked whether he would keep chasing quicker numbers, he said he hoped not. He later posted a 7.7730 average at Hot Rod Drag Week and beat JJ Da Boss on television. Read on for how that progression actually happened.
This mystery photo shows a Dodge Charger — but which one? Depending on the engine bay, this exact 1970 body style could hide anything from a 375-horsepower standard V8 to one of just 112 Hemi-powered R/Ts ever built. Here’s what to look for before you guess.
The Ford F-100 spent thirty-five years quietly rewriting what a half-ton truck could do, from its 1953 fiftieth-anniversary naming to the bumpside and dentside generations that fill classic truck shows today. Along the way it became the first Ford pickup to offer factory-built four-wheel drive in 1959 and introduced the Twin I-Beam suspension that lasted three decades. Read on to discover the party trick that left Chevrolet and Dodge playing catch-up for years.
A muscle car owner’s guide to choosing between national self-storage chains, dedicated classic car storage specialists, and doing it right at home.
Stock-motor, stock-turbo quarter-mile racing is a surprisingly competitive corner of the Porsche 911 world, where a handful of tenths separates casual bragging rights from an actual record. This twin-turbo 911 leans on nitrous and drag radials rather than internal engine work to chase that record — a very different game than the heavily built cars dominating the outright quarter-mile books.
Chevrolet’s factory SS 427 package turned a handful of full-size Impalas into genuine muscle cars between 1967 and 1969, with roughly 6,350 built across all three years combined (1,778 of those in 1968 alone), rated at either 385 or 425 horsepower. The sleeper pictured here takes that idea further, pairing period-correct Impala sheet metal with a fuel-injected 496-cubic-inch big-block and a modern 4L80E automatic overdrive transmission. The result looks like a family car and drives like anything but, continuing a sleeper reputation the factory only hinted at fifty years ago.