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Schwartz Performance took a dented California 1969 Mustang fastback, spent roughly 1,400 hours on it, and handed the finished car away to a stranger at a Las Vegas trade show. Under the Boss-inspired paint sits a 444-horsepower Coyote Boss 302 crate engine, a fabricated G-Machine chassis, and a GT500-spec brake package. Read on to find out how a brake company ended up building one of the more serious restomods of the SEMA era.
A car show that has survived a fire that leveled its original venue, multiple relocations, and more than sixty years of changing tastes has to be doing something right. The Chicago World of Wheels traces back to a 1962 gathering at Navy Pier and now fills the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center every March with everything from restored muscle cars to elaborate customs.
RJ Gottlieb’s Big Red Camaro is best known for supercharged top-speed runs, but Pikes Peak called for the opposite approach. Trading a blown 598-cube big-block for a naturally aspirated 555 called The Beast, the team made its 2017 debut on the 12.42-mile Race to the Clouds. Their fourth-place finish in the Open class shows why displacement can still out-duel boost at altitude.
By 1973 the Oldsmobile 442 had been reduced to an option code on a Cutlass, mostly stripes, emblems, and a stiffer suspension bolted under a body made heavier by federal bumper rules. Jeff Schwartz of Schwartz Performance took that exact car and gave it the performance Oldsmobile was no longer allowed to build, fabricating custom front bodywork while deliberately keeping the outside looking factory. The restraint is the entire point. Read on for what makes it work.
Ford did not simply facelift the Mustang for 1969. The company renamed the fastback body style entirely, stretched the car nearly four inches, gave it a one-year-only quad-headlight face, and launched four new models in a single season. Buyers could order anything from a mild six-cylinder commuter to a 428 Cobra Jet. Read on to find out what made the 1969 SportsRoof a genuine turning point rather than a running change.
The Optima Search for the Ultimate Street Car doesn’t reward the fastest car in a straight line — it rewards the one that can do everything: road course, autocross, braking, and still look sharp under show judging. Heading into a new season, the defending champion was riding a run of consecutive titles that few competitors have matched. Here’s what the format demands, and why a shop technician keeps beating the field.
The 2016 Ridler Award went to a 1939 Oldsmobile convertible called Olds Cool, built for a Texas couple by a small shop that spent years on a car most builders would never have chosen. The Model 60 was Oldsmobile’s entry-level six that year, not a glamour car, and complete examples are close to unfindable today. Here is what the Ridler actually demands, why the donor car made the build harder, and what separates a Great 8 finalist from the one that wins.
In 1968, an Oldsmobile engineer asked the Hurst team to help build something that should not have existed: a 442 with the Toronado’s front-wheel-drive powertrain packed into its nose. Exactly one was completed, and it survived in one owner’s hands for 42 years before Fred Mandrick acquired it in 2012. Read on to find out why Oldsmobile bothered building a front-drive muscle car nobody was ever supposed to buy.
This twin-turbo Coyote Mustang rolled onto the dyno at Dynoedge running a modified Hellion turbo kit, reworked specifically to shorten intercooler piping and cut turbo lag, and posted a run that pushed toward nearly 1,400 horsepower at 26 psi of boost. Commenters zeroed in on the exhaust note as much as the numbers, calling it one of the best-sounding Coyotes they’d heard on a dyno. Watch the full pull to see exactly what a shortened-piping Hellion setup can do to a factory 5.0.
At the 2015 SEMA show the Ringbrothers unveiled a 1965 Mustang fastback whose only original panels were the floors. Everything else was carbon fiber built in-house, widened four inches, and finished in a color-shifting Spy Green that earned the car its name: Espionage. Under the hood sat a supercharged 427-cubic-inch LS7 making a reported 959 horsepower, a General Motors engine in a Ford body, which was rather the point. Read on to find out why the bodywork mattered more than the horsepower figure.
Three divisions inside the same company built three different Hemi V8s in the early 1950s, and each one ended up with a completely different personality. Chrysler chased outright power, DeSoto split the difference, and Dodge built the smallest and mildest of the three while publicly insisting it wanted nothing to do with the horsepower race. The Red Ram’s reputation today is a little ironic given that pitch. Read on to find out how the smallest early Hemi became one of the most beloved.
Months before Dodge officially unveiled the Challenger SRT Demon, fans spotted silver, flare-fendered Challengers in an early trailer for The Fate of the Furious, with Vin Diesel appearing in a behind-the-scenes clip alongside one. The car backed up the hype: a supercharged 6.2-liter Hemi V8 making 840 horsepower and 770 lb-ft of torque, good for a 2.3-second 0-60 run. It’s one of the most dramatic factory-to-Hollywood crossovers in modern muscle car history.
The 440 Six Barrel gave the 1970 Road Runner three two-barrel carburetors, 390 horsepower, 490 lb-ft of torque, and a Dana 60 rear axle — the same hardware the mid-1969 A12 package introduced with its pinned-down fiberglass hood and hubcap-less steel wheels. Just 1,815 were built for 1970, and it ran the quarter mile in the low thirteens. Read on for why it was the smarter buy than a Hemi.
There’s an old test for spotting a genuinely serious engine: does it clear one horsepower for every cubic inch? This 1967 Corvette’s 427 doesn’t just pass that test, the 435-horse version blows past it entirely, and Chevrolet’s official numbers were famously conservative to begin with. Between the two available 427s and the race-only L88 lurking behind them, this generation of Corvette hid some of the most underrated horsepower figures of the entire muscle car era.