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Plymouth’s 1970 GTX was already losing sales to its cheaper Road Runner sibling, and the rare 440 Six Barrel option most collectors chase today made up only a small fraction of that shrinking total. With just 7,748 GTXs built that year and roughly 678 carrying the triple-carb 440, the math behind this car’s rarity is stark.
In 1966, most Chevelle shoppers who wanted power bought a Malibu or the newly standalone SS-396 — the base 300 series was built for buyers who wanted a car, not a statement. Of the 28,600 base 300s Chevrolet built that year, only 5,300 came with the optional V8, making a V8-powered example like this one the exception rather than the rule.
Long before the Hemi, Dodge started as a bicycle-parts patent and a Detroit machine shop making stove parts. Horace and John Dodge built their fortune as Henry Ford’s exclusive parts supplier, sometimes paid in stock instead of cash, before striking out to build cars under their own name in 1914. Their story ends almost as fast as it began.
The 1969 Camaro SS’s official order sheet topped out at a 375-horsepower 396, but a separate, little-known path let buyers get a factory 427 anyway — through Chevrolet’s COPO ordering system or through tuner dealers like Yenko and Baldwin-Motion. The rarest of those, the aluminum-block COPO ZL1, was built in tiny numbers and now ranks among the most valuable Camaros in existence. It’s proof the fastest ’69 SS wasn’t always the one on the brochure.
Studebaker’s story starts in 1852 as a South Bend, Indiana blacksmith shop that grew into the world’s largest builder of horse-drawn wagons, decades before it ever touched a car. When it finally entered the automobile business in 1902, its first vehicle ran on electricity, not gasoline. By 1966 the automaker was gone, folded a year later into an industrial conglomerate with no connection to cars at all.
Chevrolet spent years developing the Camaro under a code name that had nothing to do with cats and everything to do with secrecy, then refused to explain what the production name actually meant. The answer a company spokesman finally gave the press has been quoted ever since. Across thirty-five years and four generations the car went from a 427 big block to a four-cylinder to an all-aluminum 305-horsepower LS1. Read on for how it got there.
This 1940 Chevrolet wears its original pre-war sheet metal but hides a thoroughly modern 355-cubic-inch small-block V8 under the hood, paired with a 4-speed automatic transmission Chevrolet never offered on the real 1940 model. It’s a textbook street rod build: a decades-old body around drivetrain technology that didn’t exist yet when the car was new. The small-block’s legendary tunability is exactly why builders keep reaching for it.
The 1963 Chevy II Nova SS convertible carried Chevrolet’s sportiest badge and bucket seats, floor shifter, and unique trim — but not a single extra horsepower, since the only engine offered that year was a 120-hp inline six. Chevrolet dropped the convertible body from the Nova SS lineup the very next year, making 1963 the only season you could get one with the top down. It’s a rare, six-cylinder oddity hiding behind a performance badge.
Ford’s 221-cubic-inch flathead V8 earned a nickname simply from its horsepower rating: enthusiasts still call it “the 85 horse” engine decades later, even though output actually varied across its production run. This restored 1938 Deluxe, shown here courtesy of Gateway Classic Cars, represents a quiet but important midpoint in that engine’s development, right before a bigger redesign arrived later that year.
Chrysler’s second generation Hemi arrived in 1964 as a race engine barely disguised as a production part, and its nickname came honestly. The 426 stood 10.72 inches at the deck, spread its bores 4.80 inches apart, and needed an engine bay most cars did not have. Roughly 11,000 street versions were ever built. Read on for how NASCAR banned it, why the valvetrain made it so expensive, and what made it the default choice for nitro racing.
The AC Cobra Mark III started life as a British roadster body flown to Los Angeles with an empty engine bay, and ended up as the car that forced a national government to invent a speed limit. Along the way it collected a Jaguar differential, an MGB steering rack, a Volkswagen steering column, and a Ford 427 side-oiler that made 425 horsepower. One example later sold for $5.5 million. Read on for how a hurried eleventh-hour decision produced all of it.
1974 marked the final year Plymouth built the Road Runner on its original mid-size platform, with engine options still ranging from a mild 318 up to a 440 big block wearing GTX badges. Production had fallen to 11,555 cars, down from 19,056 the year before, as the muscle car era wound down. The Road Runner nameplate held on one more year on the larger Fury-based B-body before being reduced to a Volare trim package in 1976.
Alfa Romeo built a car named after Montreal, unveiled it at Expo 67 in Montreal, and then never legally sold a single new example in Canada or anywhere else in North America. Fewer than 4,000 were built, and the word Montreal appears on the car exactly once, hidden on the ashtray cover. Under the hood sits a detuned racing V8 from a sports prototype. Read on for how one of Bertone’s most striking shapes became a car almost nobody on this continent could buy.
The 1969 Shelby GT500 carried a 428 Cobra Jet rated at 335 horsepower, a figure almost nobody believed then and nobody believes now. It was also the last Shelby Mustang Carroll Shelby had any real hand in, built during the year he walked away from the program entirely. Ford ended up re-titling hundreds of leftover cars as 1970 models under federal supervision. Read on to find out what makes this generation the one collectors argue about most.
This 1969 Dodge Coronet Super Bee carries the rare A12 package, a 463-dollar option that swapped in a 440-cubic-inch V8 wearing three two-barrel carburetors for one strange mid-year run. Only 1,907 were built before Dodge moved on. Stock, these cars ran mid-13-second quarter miles, embarrassing plenty of pricier machinery on the strip.