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A 1964 Pontiac LeMans got its final bodywork and a coat of Firemist Aquamarine — a color Cadillac kept to itself — inside a pole barn with no booth and no crew. Body shop veterans with 25 and 30 years in the trade turned up in the comments to say the DIY result was genuinely good enough. Here is the part of a restoration nobody films, and the one step that decides how the whole car ends up looking.
A Novato homeowner was doing what countless classic car owners do on a weekend — trying to coax a long-dormant engine back to life in his garage. A strange chemical smell on the first attempt should have been a warning sign. Instead, a second try on the ignition ended in an engine bay explosion, a spreading hillside fire, and a two-alarm response from local firefighters. Here’s what actually happened, and why old muscle cars carry this exact risk.
Chevrolet’s L78 396 turned an ordinary 1969 Nova into a 375-horsepower street car that ran 13.87 at 105 mph, for roughly over the price of the small-block. Only about 5,200 buyers ever ordered it, and a resurfaced Dream Car Garage segment shows exactly why the survivors are guarded so fiercely today.
Plymouth’s A51 Twister package put the Duster 340’s grille, stripes and even its hood scoops on cars powered by a 145-horsepower slant six, and Dodge did the same thing with the Demon Sizzler. Half a century later, buyers are still confusing them with the genuine article. Here is exactly what separated the look from the muscle.
A professional car buyer put the 2026 Mustang GT and the 2026 Charger SIXPACK Scat Pack back to back and called the result “Not Even Close.” The Dodge has more power, all-wheel drive, and a legendary badge on the fender — and it still lost on the criteria buyers actually care about. That badge turns out to be part of the problem.
Plymouth built the 1971 ‘Cuda with a look it never repeated: quad headlights, fender gills, and billboard graphics found on no other year. UFC president Dana White picked exactly this rare-bodied ‘Cuda for a full restomod, swapping in a 425-horsepower 440 and a Curry 9-inch rear end. The result became one of MuscleCar’s most-watched builds ever.
A George Barris-customized 1968 Dodge Dart GTS convertible spent years chasing criminals on TV’s Mannix before disappearing into obscurity and eventually turning up dilapidated in a field. Automotive reporter Dave Kunz tracked it down, confirmed it by its hidden Barris touches, and restored it to its on-screen British Racing Green with the original 340 V8 still under the hood. Jay Leno takes it for a drive to find out why this compact GTS could out-hustle flashier detective-show muscle cars of its era.
The 2026 Dodge Charger R/T swaps its Hemi V8 for a 420-horsepower twin-turbo six branded SIXPACK, a name Dodge borrowed from a legendary three-carburetor 440 V8 option from 1969. A veteran reviewer tested the ,000 loaded version, and the comment section couldn’t agree on whether it still counts as a muscle car.
Somewhere in a shop that once belonged to a bankrupt car company, a wiring harness routed a few inches too close to the accelerator pedal linkage. It sounds minor. It wasn’t. American Motors issued a factory bulletin over it, and NHTSA logged it as a formal safety campaign. If you’re chasing a 1971 AMC Javelin because it’s one of the last genuinely affordable muscle cars from the era, that’s exactly the kind of detail that separates a great original find from a car that needs real attention before it’s road-trustworthy. Here’s what a 691,000-view full build episode, decades of AMC ownership experience, and the federal recall record actually say about buying one.
At 6Sixty Street’s Pre-72 class, there’s one rule that never bends: if your muscle car wasn’t built before 1972, it doesn’t line up — and if it can’t drive itself to the start line, it doesn’t race at all. No trailers, no tow rigs, no exceptions. It’s a throwback that turned a grassroots meetup into 44 minutes of Nova-on-Nova rematches and one Ford truck nobody saw coming.
Dodge tried going all-electric with the Charger Daytona, and enthusiasts made their disappointment clear. For 2026, the brand is walking part of it back — dropping the Hemi V8 but also the electric-only approach, in favor of a 3.0L twin-turbo inline-six making up to 550 horsepower under a legendary name pulled straight from 1970s Mopar history: SIXPACK. At around $55,000 for the Scat Pack trim, this is Dodge’s answer to enthusiast backlash. Watch to see whether it actually delivers.