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This 1938 Bugatti tribute wears the horseshoe grille and spoked wheels of one of the most famous race cars ever built, but its 1600cc four-cylinder engine gives away a secret most tribute builds share. With real Type 35s worth seven figures and fewer than 350 ever made, replicas like this one are usually built on far humbler underpinnings. Here’s what’s really hiding beneath the bodywork.
This 1955 Chevrolet Nomad wears a two-tone cream-and-orange paint job straight out of the showroom era, but pop the hood and you’ll find something no 1955 buyer ever ordered: a modern LT1 crate engine backed by a four-speed. Chevrolet built only around 8,386 of these two-door wagons in their debut year, making this one of the rarest Tri-Fives on the road. See what happens when a 1950s design icon gets a genuinely modern heart.
By 2014, the Dodge Charger SRT8 packed a 470-horsepower V8 and genuine track-ready braking into a car still priced around $30,000 — less than half what comparable European performance sedans cost at the time. Getting there took three model years of shared engineering with the Chrysler 300, a redesigned face, and an engine lineup that kept growing without ever changing the car’s basic bones. Read on to find out how this generation closed out with a genuine value argument, not just an attitude.
Before the 426 Hemi became the engine everyone associates with the name, Dodge was quietly running two completely different cylinder head designs side by side through the 1950s — a genuine hemispherical head and a cheaper poly compromise, often wearing nearly identical badging. Telling them apart today comes down to details as small as a dimple stamped into a valve cover. Read on to find out how to actually identify which engine is under the hood.
Pontiac deleted the GTO’s hidden headlights for 1970, added a rear sway bar, and quietly offered an ultra-rare exhaust option that only 233 cars ever received. A year later, the Judge was gone entirely. Read on to see how the GTO’s final two model years handled the industry’s shift away from raw horsepower.
The 1963 Impala SS looks like a full-size cruiser and, ordered correctly, was one of the fastest cars Chevrolet sold that year. The car in this Gateway Classic Cars gallery carries the rare factory dash-mounted tachometer, an option most buyers skipped and the one that tells you what the original owner intended. Read on for the engine that a pop song made famous and the aluminum trim that defines the model year.
Dodge built the 1969 Charger Daytona for exactly one reason: to beat Ford on NASCAR’s fastest superspeedways, and every strange line on the car traces back to a wind tunnel rather than a styling studio. Only about 503 were built to satisfy homologation rules, and roughly seventy of those carried the 426 Hemi. The wing’s real purpose is not the one most people repeat, and the fender scoops have nothing to do with cooling. Read on for what this car was actually engineering around.
The 1973 Corvette is the only one Chevrolet ever built with a soft, body-colored nose bolted to a hard chrome tail, and that mismatch was not a styling choice at all. A federal bumper rule landed halfway through the car’s life and forced Chevrolet’s hand, setting off a chain of changes that reached far deeper than the front end. Quieter, smoother, and riding on radials for the first time, the ’73 marks the moment America’s sports car started becoming something else entirely. Read on for what that year really changed.
The third-generation Impala arrived in 1961 looking like nothing Chevrolet had built before, and it produced two body styles that collectors now hunt specifically because almost nobody wanted them when they were new. It also produced a 409 that got its own hit song, a dashboard where the temperature gauge was replaced by a warning light, and a 1964 engine option good for 425 horsepower. Read on for what separates the good years from the great ones.
One advertising jingle did more to shape how Americans imagined the open road than almost any single car ever built. It started in 1948 as a song written for a television variety program, found its permanent voice in Dinah Shore, and ran as a Sunday night ritual through 1963. The story of how six words got planted that deeply in the American psyche is stranger, and considerably more musical, than most car fans realize.
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.
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.
In 1965, Chevrolet sold more than one million Impalas in a single year — an all-time industry record that has never been broken. Over the next five years the car would get outshined by its own spinoff, borrow styling cues from the Corvette, and quietly absorb a wave of new federal safety mandates. Read on to find out how a record-setting best-seller ended up playing second fiddle to the model it created.
The 1987 Corvette’s 5.7-liter L98 looks like a minor running change on paper, but it hid a valvetrain upgrade – roller hydraulic lifters – that did more for performance than the fuel injection system it’s usually credited for. Here’s how Chevrolet finally moved past its awkward Cross-Fire Injection years, and what quietly changed inside the engine that year.
Ford outsold Chevrolet by 10 percent in 1951, and the optional 239 cubic inch flathead V8 under this coupes hood was part of the reason why. That same engine, simple enough for anyone to modify, became the foundation of the postwar hot rod movement and helped define an entire era of American car culture. Here is why builders still chase this engine family decades later.