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This 1965 Corvette Sting Ray carries the standard 327 V8 and 4-speed manual, not the ultra-rare fuel-injected version Chevrolet also offered that year for $538. With only 771 fuelie cars built before the option quietly disappeared, most 1965 buyers picked exactly the setup shown here. It turned out to be the smarter choice for reasons Chevrolet is own big-block engine would soon prove.
Oldsmobile never built a 383-cubic-inch engine in 1971 – the factory topped out at 455 cubic inches for the 442, the last year it existed as its own model. This Cutlass instead runs a custom stroker build paired with a 4-speed automatic, restored on camera for the Car Warriors reality series. It’s a reminder that some of the most interesting muscle car builds are the ones that ignore the original spec sheet entirely.
Chevrolet had an El Camino prototype drawn up in 1952 and then let it sit untouched for seven years. What finally pushed it into production was watching Ford get rewarded for the same idea. The car that resulted wore Bel Air trim over a Biscayne interior, carried a corrugated steel bed floor, and in its hottest form ran a 14-second quarter with a tri-carb 348 under the hood. Two model years later it was gone. Read on to find out what killed it.
Chevrolet built the Chevy II because the Corvair could not beat the Ford Falcon, and it built it fast — a full range of five body styles and four trim levels, on a wheelbase deliberately half an inch longer than the Falcon’s. Then drag racers noticed how little it weighed, and a dealer-installed V8 changed the plot entirely. Read on to find out how a compact economy car ended up in the same conversation as the GTO.
Chevrolet’s 1965 Z16 option packed a 396-cubic-inch, 375-horsepower big-block into the Malibu SS body years before a proper big-block platform existed for it. The package included a heavy-duty chassis, reinforced frame, and a Muncie four-speed – no automatic was offered. At nearly 60 percent of a base Malibu’s price, the option itself scared off most buyers before scarcity ever entered the picture.
The Series 2 Lotus Elise failed its U.S. headlight regulations and failed the 5 mph impact test, and it was sold in America anyway — under a three-year exemption. It went on to become what many consider the finest Lotus ever built, running a Toyota engine with a cylinder head designed by Yamaha. Read on to find out how a company famous for adding lightness ended up 187 pounds heavier and still faster than before.
This 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air represents the middle year of the legendary tri-five run, powered by the 265 cubic-inch V8 that Chevrolet refined with an integral oil filter for ’56. Depending on carburetion, that engine ranged from a mild 162 horsepower up to a genuinely quick 240-horsepower dual-quad setup capable of a 16.3-second quarter mile. Chevrolet built nearly 700,000 Bel Airs that year alone.
A German Formula One driver once drove a Porsche 550 Spyder underneath a closed railway crossing gate during a race, without slowing down. That is how low the car sat, and part of why a 1,498cc four-cylinder could humiliate machinery with twice the displacement. Then James Dean bought chassis number 55, had a name painted on the trunk lid, and turned a race car into something else entirely. Read on for the whole story.
Only three Caterham R500 EVOs were ever built, and each one cost 42,000 British pounds — around $69,000 — without a heater or any other comfort you might reasonably expect. One of them went out and left a Ferrari Enzo behind. The Enzo cost roughly ten times as much. Read on to find out how a company that started with a Lotus parts license ended up embarrassing Maranello.
Ask ten muscle car fans to name the greatest of all time and you will get eleven answers and one argument. A reader poll settled it once, and the results are stranger than you would expect: the car that finished first was never designed to race, and the car with the highest horsepower rating finished second. Read on for the full countdown and the numbers behind each placing.
Buick’s 1957 Roadmaster 75 wasn’t even a full-year model — it arrived mid-cycle in March, fully loaded, riding on a freshly enlarged 364-cubic-inch Nailhead V8. Only 12,250 were built, and just 28 remain registered with the Buick Club of America today. Here’s what made this mid-year Roadmaster stand out. Well-preserved survivors like this one are becoming exceptionally hard to find.
This 1948 Chevrolet sedan left the factory with a 216-cubic-inch six and a three-speed gearbox built for practicality. Decades later, someone dropped in a 454-cubic-inch V8 and a 4-speed, turning a postwar family car into a genuine sleeper. The transformation raises the obvious question: how much else got upgraded along the way?
By 1976 the horsepower war was over and Detroit had lost. Pontiac marked its fiftieth anniversary with a black and gold Trans Am that looked far faster than it was, and then its engineers did something nobody else in the industry managed that decade: they made the numbers go back up. Read on to find out which two sets of cylinder heads they used to do it.
Bill Devin started out racing a modified Crosley on a car salesman’s budget — then built a modular fiberglass body mold nobody else in the industry had figured out. By 1958, his shop was shipping nearly 100 body shells a week worldwide. This particular roadster is one of only 16 built to this exact spec, running a 283 Corvette V8.
The combustion chamber that made Chrysler famous was never Chrysler’s invention, and the company’s first hemispherical engine was not designed for a car at all. It was drawn for a fighter plane, then refined in a tank, and it reached showrooms in 1951 wearing a name that had nothing to do with geometry. Read on to find out how a wartime experiment became the most valuable four letters in American performance.