Posts By: Jack Harmon
Buick spent two decades disguising some of the fastest cars General Motors ever built as luxury sedans. The 1970 GSX Stage 1 hid a 510 lb-ft big block under a car built for church parking lots, and the 1987 turbocharged GNX blew past that year’s Corvette in the quarter-mile. Here’s how a brand nobody feared became one of muscle car history’s biggest sleepers.
A 1968 Chevy Nova has traded its small-block V8 for the turbocharged straight-six out of a Toyota Supra, and the numbers make the swap impossible to dismiss: over 860 wheel horsepower, more than double what any factory Nova SS ever produced. Here’s how a 2JZ ended up under a muscle car’s hood, and whether the swap actually holds up as a daily-drivable build.
A numbers-matching 1971 Plymouth ‘Cuda with the rare 440 Six Barrel engine and a four-speed manual is about to cross the auction block in Las Vegas — one of only 108 Plymouth ever built with that exact combination. Its quad headlights and shark-gill fender vents mark it as a one-year-only design, and its drivetrain still carries the original numbers. Here’s what makes this ‘Cuda worth watching when the gavel drops.
A 1972 Dodge Challenger arrived during the weakest years Detroit’s muscle cars ever saw, topping out at 240 factory horsepower with no Hemi in sight. Car Craft’s revived build series just swapped in Mopar’s 807-horsepower Hellcrate Redeye, the same crate engine Dodge sells over the counter. The bigger challenge wasn’t the engine itself, but getting a car never designed for fuel injection to survive it.
A fourth-generation Pontiac Firebird Trans Am hides a Corvette-derived LS1 V8 under a body style most collectors still overlook. Owners in the comments back the pitch up with odometers past a quarter-million miles. Here is why a mechanic with over five decades on the job calls it the smartest cheap muscle car buy left.
Most 1970 Mercury Cyclone Spoilers built with the rare 429 Super Cobra Jet have long since vanished. One owner didn’t just save his — he races it in a class that demands factory-look parts and stock-style tires, and it’s turning 11-second quarter miles. Here’s the story behind Detroit’s most overlooked 429.
An Oldsmobile outsold the Mustang and the Camaro combined for years running in the mid-1970s, and its 87-year-old designer is finally telling the story. Len Casillo shaped the Cutlass Supreme’s formal Colonnade lines — the same lines that turned a mid-size Oldsmobile into America’s best-selling car two years running.
Every other muscle car nameplate has gone electric, gone away, or gone soft trying to chase sports car rivals twice its price. The Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat did none of those things, staying loud, huge, and supercharged right up until production ended for good. Borrowed from UK specialist importer Clive Sutton for this review, it sets out to answer a pointed question: with rivals increasingly drifting toward supercar territory, is this genuinely the last great muscle car? Watch to see the case this drive makes.
A 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona built to chase a 200-mph NASCAR dream has sat in a private collection without ever being titled or plated — not once in over 50 years. Only 503 of these winged Mopars were built before NASCAR rewrote the rulebook to stop them. Here’s the story behind one of the rarest muscle cars in America.
AMC had a fastback on the auto-show floor before the Mustang even existed, then handed the idea to a new CEO who scrapped it for something bigger and slower to sell. The result moved barely 17,000 units in three years, yet one six-cylinder survivor from suburban Chicago shows exactly why the story still matters — and its owner bought it in 2011 for a reason that has nothing to do with horsepower.
You’ve found it — a stunning 1967 Shelby GT500, paint gleaming, engine bay detailed to concours standard, everything you dreamed about since you were staring at a Bullitt poster as a kid. But how much of what you’re looking at is genuinely original, and how much of what’s holding that car together was actually done right? A German restoration shop called V8-Werk has built a reputation making cars from this era better than the original — and watching how they work reveals just how much invisible engineering separates a properly sorted GT500 from one that only looks the part. Reproduction parts, real-world recalls, and decades-old brake and fuel systems can all hide behind a fresh coat of paint. Before you sign anything on a 1967 Shelby GT500, here’s what a genuine restoration reveals — and what NHTSA’s own recall and complaint files say buyers should double-check.