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Carroll Shelby’s heart condition ended his racing career, but it never slowed down the second act that followed. From founding Shelby American in 1962 to shaping the Cobra, the Shelby Mustang, and later Dodge’s Viper program under Lee Iacocca and Bob Lutz, Shelby left his fingerprints on two rival American automakers at once. Read on to find out how one man’s name ended up on performance cars from both Ford and Dodge.
The 2013 Chrysler 300 SRT8 wears no hood scoop, no rear wing, and nothing that separates it visually from the six-cylinder rental-lot version parked next to it. Then you step on the gas, and a 470-horsepower 6.4-liter Hemi puts a lot of imported performance machinery in the rearview mirror. Launch control, three suspension modes, and a 175 mph top end round out one of the best sleeper sedans Detroit ever built. Read on to find out what makes it work.
This 1932 Ford roadster proves the old hot-rodder rule that the engine badge never mattered as much as what is actually bolted to it, under the hood sits a bored-out Pontiac 400 breathing through a tri-power setup pulled from a completely different Pontiac decades later. Add in a mix-and-match interior built around 1940 Ford components, and this roadster tells the story of a builder who cared more about the finished product than staying loyal to one brand. Here is what makes this kind of cross-brand hot rod build a genuine hobby tradition, not a shortcut.
The Corvair remains the only mass-produced, rear-engine, air-cooled car ever built by an American manufacturer, and for most of the 1960s it genuinely competed with the VW Beetle — even spawning a turbocharged Monza Spyder and a 180-horsepower turbo Corsa. Then a single book changed everything, and sales collapsed from more than 300,000 units a year to just 6,000. Read on for the full story of the Corvair’s rise and its rapid fall.
This isn’t just another old Model T on a showroom floor — it’s one of the very last ones Ford ever built, rolling off the line in the same stretch of 1927 that saw the fifteen-millionth example completed before Henry Ford closed the book on the car that invented mass-market motoring. Nineteen years, one design, and a number no other automaker had ever approached. See what made the final run of America’s first true production car special, and why it still matters to everyone who loves what came after it.
This 1971 Chevrolet Nova arrived at Vanguard Motor Sales with barely a paragraph of description, but the comments filled in the blanks fast — viewers pegged it as a serious resto-mod running what one commenter called ‘7.4 liters of fun,’ shorthand for a 454 cubic-inch big block Chevrolet never offered in this body style. The amber lighting and paint drew their own praise, with one viewer calling it a flat-out show stopper. Watch to see a compact built as a blank canvas rather than a numbers-matching original.
Chevrolet’s 1955 Bel Air debuted with an engine so influential that every Chevy small-block built for the next four decades traced back to it — even though the earliest examples burned oil and struggled on regular gas. From the 195-horsepower Super Power Pack to the rare fuel-injected 283 offered in 1957, the TriFive years defined an entire era of Chevrolet performance. Read on for the full year-by-year breakdown of what made these cars so significant.
Pontiac sold the 1964 Grand Prix as a personal-luxury coupe, all formal styling and quiet comfort — but buyers who checked the right boxes on the order sheet could walk out with a genuine 421 HO Tri-Power making 370 horsepower and a brand-new Muncie 4-speed. Here’s the real top-of-the-line engine lineup, and why one number that keeps getting repeated about this car isn’t quite right.
A Cobra replica isn’t trying to fool anybody – it’s trying to prove that a sixty-year-old shape can still be genuinely quick by modern standards. This one pairs a 347 cubic inch stroker small-block with a manual gearbox and the lightweight body that made the original famous in the first place. Here’s what actually goes into building a tribute car that can back up its looks.
The 1974 Gran Torino Elite wasn’t built to win a stoplight drag race — it was built to steal buyers away from the Chevrolet Monte Carlo, and it moved nearly 100,000 units doing it. But look at what emissions rules did to horsepower and weight between 1968 and 1974, and this quiet personal-luxury coupe tells a much bigger story about where the muscle car era actually went.
This 1929 Ford Model A wears its purple paint and white stripes like a period-correct hot rod, but under the hood sits a 350 cubic inch V8 and an automatic transmission — nothing Henry Ford ever intended, and exactly what generations of hot rodders have loved about this platform. These photos, courtesy of Gateway Classic Cars, capture a build made for cruising as much as showing off.
Chevrolet’s 350 small-block went through four dramatically different personalities in barely a decade — from the 425-horsepower NHRA-rated LT-1 in 1970 to a computer-assisted, 190-horsepower L81 just eleven years later. Tracing the L46, LT-1, L82, and L81 in sequence lays out exactly how emissions rules and changing priorities reshaped one of GM’s most important engines. Read on for the full breakdown, casting numbers included.
Everybody remembers the golden age of the Camaro Z28, but 1979 quietly delivered something nobody expected: a genuine sales record. At the height of the malaise era, with horsepower gutted across Detroit, Chevy still moved a staggering 84,877 Z28s, more than in any other year the car has ever seen. This numbers-matching 350/TH350 example, sourced through Gateway Classic Cars, is a reminder that even muscle car’s darkest chapter still had some fight left in it.
The AMC Javelin SST arrived for 1968 with safety features its bigger-budget rivals hadn’t even considered yet, plus a 343 V8 that could be ordered with a performance-oriented “Go Pack” four-barrel carburetor. It’s a pony car that out-engineered the competition in ways period buyers rarely noticed, and one that’s genuinely restorable thanks to shared GM parts. Read on to find out exactly what made AMC’s underdog pony car worth a second look.
It’s easy to forget International Harvester was building serious 4x4s before “SUV” was even a marketing term, and this 1977 Scout II is a reminder of just how capable those trucks were. Riding on the optional 345 cubic-inch V8 and a 3-speed automatic, this Gateway Classic Cars example represents a truck brand that walked away from the market right before SUVs took over America. Here’s why that timing still stings for International loyalists.