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Packard built roughly 55 examples of the 1603 Super Eight Touring Sedan for 1938, and today only about two dozen are believed to survive. It was the lightest body style in the whole Super Eight lineup, which meant it was also the quickest, riding on a 320 cubic inch straight-eight and a shorter 127-inch wheelbase. This Gateway Classic gallery captures a genuinely scarce piece of Depression-era engineering most people would drive right past without a second look.
Ford planned for about 10,000 first-year Thunderbird sales and blew past that number, moving 16,155 units instead with 3,500 orders in the first ten days alone. This 1955 example carries the 292 V8 and Ford-O-Matic combination that made the original two-seater such an easy car to drive daily. It’s a reminder that Ford built the Thunderbird to answer the Corvette, then deliberately steered it toward comfort instead of raw sportiness.
Most 1957 Thunderbird buyers never knew Ford quietly built America’s first production supercharged V8 that same year. Roughly 200 F-code cars left the factory rated at 300 horsepower — though Paxton itself claimed the real number was closer to 360. Here’s the story behind Ford’s rarest personal luxury car of the decade.
A Studebaker executive sketched a car on an airplane, and forty days later engineers had a working prototype of America’s first personal luxury muscle car. The Avanti’s story is stranger than most, involving disc brakes before anyone else offered them and a Bonneville-record-setting supercharged engine. Read on to see how a dying company built something this ambitious.
Chevrolet’s 350 spent from 1981 to 1996 quietly reinventing itself under different VIN codes — a low-compression truck motor, a twin-throttle-body Corvette engine, and eventually a tuned-port small block making 245 horsepower. Along the way it powered everything from K30 pickups and motorhomes to the Buick Roadmaster and even the Hummer H1. Read on to see how one engine family did so many different jobs across three decades of GM production.
Three of the most famous small-block Chevrolet engines ever built, the 302, the 327, and the 350, share the same 4.0-inch bore, the same block casting, and in many cases the same casting numbers. Only the stroke tells them apart. This third installment in our small-block series follows the 4.0-inch bore family from the 1962 327 through the 1968 journal change, the Trans-Am 302, the Duntov cam, and the 350 that eventually powered everything from Corvettes to delivery vans. Read on to find out how one casting did so much.
This 1969 Buick Skylark wears every badge and stripe of a genuine GS – right down to the hood scoop and monogrammed vinyl roof – but underneath is a more modest Special Deluxe coupe running a smaller 280-horsepower V8. Buick built only 3,574 examples of the California GS, an affordable package that let buyers buy the muscle car look without the muscle car price tag. Tom McCahill still clocked it to 60 mph in under 10 seconds.
The 1964 Pontiac GTO started life as a loophole in GM’s own corporate rulebook, and the rarest version of it packed three carburetors instead of one. Only a fraction of that first model year’s production carried the Tri-Power option that made the GTO a genuine performance threat. Here’s what separated the base car from the one everyone really wanted, and why a correct restoration is harder than it looks.
For a few months in early 1968, Ford’s legendary 427 side-oiler found its way into the last car anyone expected: a plush, chrome-trimmed Mercury Cougar GT-E. Only 357 of these cars ever left the factory with that engine, making it the final production application of Ford’s storied big-block before the 428 Cobra Jet took over. Read on to find out why this quietly luxurious pony car cousin still ranks among the rarest big-block Fords of its era.
Long before Detroit had ever heard of sliding doors on a sports car, one designer built this one in total secrecy, using a patent he’d been sitting on for years and a platform meant for a completely different, far duller Kaiser sedan. Only 435 were built before the whole program collapsed in under a year, and the man who designed it refused to let it disappear quietly. What happened to the leftover cars is stranger than the car itself.
Chrysler built only 16 examples of a fuel-injected 392 Hemi for the 1958 300D, and 15 of them were quietly retrofitted back to carburetors within the same model year. That’s just one chapter in a decade where Chrysler’s FirePower Hemi and DeSoto’s own separate Hemi family kept leapfrogging each other in displacement and horsepower. Read on to find out how a 331-cubic-inch engine grew into some of the most powerful production V8s of the 1950s.
This 1969 Pontiac GTO on Gateway Classic Cars’ floor doesn’t have a Pontiac engine under its hood — and that alone is enough to start a fight at any car show. A 461-cube big block Chevy and a built TH400 have taken the place of whatever Pontiac mill lived there originally, trading numbers-matching bragging rights for a drivetrain combo that just doesn’t quit. Love it or hate it, this GTO is proof the swap debate in muscle car circles is far from settled.
Nobody built cars to disappear quite like Chevrolet built the 1964 Biscayne, the cheapest full-size car in the lineup, yet a rare handful of buyers spec’d it with the same 409 big-block that made the Impala SS famous. Stripped of chrome and drag-strip focused, a 409 Biscayne is arguably the ultimate factory sleeper of its era. Here is why even dedicated Chevrolet historians cannot agree on exactly how many were built.
The original Dodge Viper skipped door handles entirely because comfort wasn’t the point. After a two-year hiatus, the reborn Viper had to prove it could add carbon fiber trim, a touchscreen, and heated leather without losing what made the original such a raw, uncompromising machine. Read on to find out how a 640-horsepower V10 roadster ended up quiet enough to actually live with, and still came in under $100,000.