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This 1958 Pontiac Chieftain rolled off the line during the final season of a nameplate Pontiac had built since 1949, one year before an all-new Catalina made it obsolete. Under its restyled, honeycomb-grille body sat an air suspension and tri-power V8 borrowed from Pontiac’s priciest engineering ideas. Only a few thousand were built this way. Here’s what made the last Chieftain worth a second look.
This 1966 Ford Fairlane 500XL hides a 1969-spec 428 Cobra Jet under its personal-luxury styling, backed by a four-speed, a 9-inch Posi rear, and period-correct 427 R-code exhaust manifolds. WeBe Autos Ltd. is offering it as a finished, sorted build rather than an unfinished project. Watch the full walkaround for the complete parts list.
This 1979 Ford Thunderbird closed out an entire era of the car’s design before Ford downsized it the following year, and it still wears its copper-bronze paint, half-vinyl roof, and wire wheel covers exactly as it left the showroom. Consigned through Gateway Classic Cars, it’s a genuine time capsule of the personal luxury coupe at its peak. Read on to see what made this send-off model so popular.
This 1979 Chevrolet El Camino carries the last 350-cubic-inch V8 GM would ever offer in the model, riding on the sharper-edged Malibu-based body Chevrolet introduced for 1978. By this point the base engine had shrunk to a 200-cubic-inch V6 — a sign of where the truck-car hybrid, and the muscle car era around it, was heading. Read on to find out what made 1979 the end of an era for this unusual Chevrolet.
Dodge invented the Super Bee by taking everything expensive out of a Coronet and leaving everything fast, then spent 1969 escalating the engine list until a 426 Hemi was sitting on the order form. Buried inside that model year was a package aimed at drag racers that Dodge barely advertised. This Gateway Classic Cars gallery captures the result. Read on for the option code that separates a good Super Bee from a great one.
This 1978 Lincoln Continental Town Coupe carries Ford’s biggest V-8, the 460-cubic-inch big block, in its final year of availability before it was discontinued. Despite the muscle under the hood, the Town Coupe was built to float, not sprint — and it lost the sales war to Cadillac’s Coupe de Ville by a wide margin that year. Read on to find out why buyers chose the underdog anyway.
The line gets quoted at every car show, usually as a joke about human nature. Henry Ford was not joking. He was describing something that happened to him personally, in an era when a race was often the only way to prove a car worked at all. Read on to find out how that instinct traveled from the 1890s to the fender badges on a 1967 Mustang.
Chrysler built the GTX to be a gentleman’s muscle car in 1967, and it worked — for about two years. Then the company’s own Road Runner undercut it on price and style, and the GTX spent the rest of its production run fighting a rival built in-house. Read on to find out how a cheaper stablemate nearly killed one of Mopar’s most underrated performance cars, and why collectors are finally catching on to what made it special.
Most builders pick one form of forced induction and stop there. This 1969 Camaro SS runs a 14-71 supercharger, a pair of 68mm turbochargers, and a fogger nitrous system, all feeding the same 468-cubic-inch big-block. It sits on a full Pro Street chassis with a cage, wheelie bars, and a parachute, yet the interior is finished in leather good enough for a Riddler contender. Read on for why nobody, including its owner, has ever put it on a dyno.
This 1968 Chevrolet Camaro looks street-legal at a glance — working lights, turn signals, a full interior — but the tubbed rear end and fabricated chassis underneath tell a different story. Under a polished Pro-Filer induction setup sits a big-block build engineered for the strip, not Main Street. Read on to find out what separates a genuine pro-street Camaro from anything Chevrolet ever built.
This restomod 1955 Ford Thunderbird trades its original 292-cubic-inch V-8 for a blown 396 Chevy big block breathing through a 6-71 supercharger poking straight through the hood. Underneath the red paint and whitewalls sits a Mustang II front end, a Ford 9-inch rear, and modern disc brakes — all wrapped around the body that nearly didn’t happen. Read on to find out what a $2,944 personal luxury car from 1955 has in common with a 1,000-plus-cubic-inch-equivalent street machine.
Between 1959 and 1962, Oldsmobile redesigned the Rocket 88 practically every single year — new frames, new suspensions, and an American first buried inside the lineup that most shoppers walked right past. The Starfire’s console-mounted shifter changed how automatic transmissions were packaged industry-wide. Read on to find out which year brought the biggest structural change, and why the Starfire deserves more credit than it usually gets.
Between 1969 and 1974, Jaguar’s E-Type went through more change than any four-year stretch in its history — detuned engines for U.S. emissions rules, a completely new V12, and a dozen ultra-rare lightweight racers built alongside the roadgoing cars. The Series III’s 5.3-liter V12 turned the E-Type into a genuinely different machine, capable of 135 mph and a 14.82-second quarter mile. Read on to find out what separates a Series II from a Series III, and why twelve specific cars from 1963 and 1964 remain the most valuable E-Types ever built.
Chevrolet’s full-size Super Sport went from a genuine performance flagship in 1966 to a nearly unmarked sleeper by 1969, as buyers defected to the Chevelle and Nova and the SS427 option shrank to just a few thousand units a year. Front disc brakes finally arrived in the model’s final season. Read on to find out how to tell a genuine SS427 from a well-built tribute.