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Calling a 1962 Chevrolet Impala two-door hardtop sweet barely scratches what that model year actually meant for Chevrolet. A $53.80 trim option that had existed for barely a year was about to become one of the most influential ideas in the company’s history, and at the top of the engine range sat a 409 that made buyers give up their automatic transmission to get it. Read on to find out how the Super Sport took over and how close this hardtop came to the fastest option on the lot.
More than 200 classic, sport, and muscle cars filled Saratoga Spa State Park for the Saratoga Automobile Museum’s 15th annual spring show. The museum itself has an unusual backstory, housed in a repurposed Georgian Revival building that once served as a New York State bottling plant. The turnout capped off a season-opening event with an audience built from the region’s century-old resort-town appeal. Read on to find out what made this year’s show stand out.
Ford built the third-generation “Bullet Bird” Thunderbird for only three model years, and 1963 was the last of them. Of the 63,313 built that year, just 5,913 were convertibles, powered by a 390 FE making 300 horsepower and 427 lb-ft and backed exclusively by an automatic. It was never intended to race anything, and that was entirely the point. Read on to find out what Ford was really building here.
At the Barrett-Jackson Collection Showroom in Scottsdale, Lou Costabile talks with Showroom Sales Associate Mike Hoye about a 1972 Chevrolet Camaro SS finished in an uncommon Gulf Green paint over a 350 V8. 1972 marked one of the final years for the original SS badge before it disappeared from the Camaro lineup for a decade. See what makes this color and condition combination stand out.
This 1970 Ford Torino GT, nicknamed ‘All In,’ turned heads at a Corvette-only car show despite being built by a completely different brand. Ford’s designers reshaped the Torino that year around a ‘coke-bottle’ body and built only 56,819 GTs out of 230,411 total Torinos, with just 3,939 convertibles among them. The nameplate went on to win Motor Trend’s Car of the Year. Read on to find out what makes a mid-size Ford confident enough to crash someone else’s car show.
Some of the most aerodynamically efficient cars ever built look nothing alike, from the bubble-shaped Volkswagen XL1 to the deceptively ordinary Mercedes-Benz EQS. This rundown breaks down what a drag coefficient actually measures and which production vehicles have posted the lowest numbers on record. The results reshuffle a lot of assumptions about which cars are actually cutting through the air the most efficiently.
A teenager who fell in love with Mopars watching quarter-mile battles at a Rhode Island airstrip in the early ’60s spent decades chasing down the car that started it all: a 1964 Plymouth Savoy carrying Chrysler’s Max Wedge engine in its final and rarest form. Here’s why that one model year, and that one drivetrain combination, was never repeated.
1970 was the year Ford finally let the Torino nameplate flex real muscle. Motor Trend had just named it Car of the Year, and buyers could order a Torino Cobra with a Ram Air 429 and a Hurst-shifted four-speed instead of the usual family-hauler running gear. Only 7,675 took the offer. Here is what separated a Cobra Jet from a Super Cobra Jet, and why clean original interiors like this one are harder to find than the engines.
Car Craft brought a 1968 Chevrolet Chevelle SS396 hardtop to Irwindale dragstrip in November 1967 expecting the 375-horsepower L78 to dominate the timeslip. Writer John Raffa came away frustrated instead, and said so in print in the February 1968 issue. That contradiction, a genuinely fast car that still disappointed the man driving it, says more about muscle car era expectations than any dyno figure. Read on to find out what quarter-mile testing actually measured.
Ford’s design studios didn’t stop at the Mustang that made it to showrooms, they also sketched a mid-engine two-seat exotic, a European-flavored roadster, an 855-horsepower one-off, and even a station wagon wearing the pony badge. Some near-misses shaped legendary programs that did get built; others vanished after a single running prototype. Read on to see which unbuilt Mustangs came closest to changing the car’s entire story.
Nothing about this Corvette’s original build sheet matches what is under its hood today. The factory small-block has given way to a 383 stroker with an upgraded transmission, suspension and cooling system, wearing dark blue metallic paint over a restored leather interior. The stock 1981 engine made 190 horsepower. This one claims 500. Read on for how that gap got closed, and why 1981 was one of the strangest years in Corvette history.
The 1971 ‘Cuda is the only Barracuda with four headlights and gilled front fenders, and it was the last year for the 426 Hemi, the 440 Six Barrel, and the convertible. Plymouth built roughly 108 Hemi hardtops and about eleven Hemi convertibles, only seven of which were sold new in the United States. Most cars carried a 340 or a 383 instead. Read on for what separates a rare ‘Cuda from a merely handsome one.
Dodge could have sold the Hellcat on horsepower numbers alone. Instead it hired the star of the biggest car franchise in movie history, scored three commercials to a track built for tension rather than a jingle, and closed each one with a line that reads more like a recruitment pitch than an ad. The Brotherhood of Muscle campaign told buyers almost nothing about the cars. Here is why that was exactly the point, and why it worked.
Three Swedish friends took a 1966 Chevrolet Bel Air to Budapest for a downtown burnout, then shipped it to the United States to attempt Drag Week, an event requiring five strip passes at five tracks with hundreds of highway miles driven in between. The Bel Air was Chevrolet’s mid-tier family car, built more than 236,000 times that year. Read on to find out why that made it the right choice.
The 2017 Shelby GT350’s 5.2-liter Voodoo V8 used a flat-plane crankshaft, revved to 8,250 rpm, and made 526 horsepower without a turbo or a supercharger anywhere in sight. It was hand-assembled by two-person teams on a dedicated line, sounded more like a Ferrari than a Mustang, and lasted five model years before Ford moved on. Owners still treat surviving examples as a limited-run specialty engine rather than an ordinary Mustang V8. Read on for why.