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Ford’s 2015-2017 Mustang GT looks nearly identical year to year, but small changes in infotainment, suspension tuning, and paint colors separate one model year from the next. SYNC 2 gave way to SYNC 3, struts got re-valved for a smoother ride, and a handful of exclusive colors came and went — clues that can date a Mustang GT even when the sheet metal gives nothing away. Can you tell which year this yellow GT rolled off the line?
Hennessey Performance took a Camaro ZL1 that already made 650 horsepower from the factory and decided that was not nearly enough. The resulting package carries a claimed four-figure output, a name aimed squarely at a rival from Auburn Hills, and a price that doubles what the donor car cost. A dozen buyers signed up before most people had even seen one run. Read on for what is actually in the package.
Ford got to the pony car market more than two years before Chevrolet did, and it has been holding that head start over Camaro owners ever since. Chevrolet’s counterargument is that arriving late let it arrive better sorted. Sixty years of Trans-Am racing, back-door dealer specials, cancellations, and revivals later, only one of the two is still in production. Read on for how the rivalry actually played out, decade by decade.
Chevrolet’s marketing department wanted a clean round number when the C6 Corvette arrived, and enthusiasts have been quoting the wrong displacement ever since. The engine in this 2006 coupe is smaller than most people assume, and it still made the base Corvette embarrassing to cars costing twice as much. Here is what the LS2 actually displaced, what the C6 changed underneath, and why a clean early C6 remains one of the best performance bargains anywhere.
Jeff Stolowski bought this 1970 Oldsmobile 442 convertible sight unseen, based on nothing more than a friend’s description of an estate sale find. Only after it arrived did he start noticing options that did not belong on an ordinary 442 — clues that led him to discover he had actually purchased Official Pace Car Number 1. He brought the car to the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals in Rosemont, Illinois, to share its story with the community that appreciates it most. Watch to find out what tipped him off.
Ford built roughly 15,000 Fox body Mustangs specifically for police work, and almost nobody outside law enforcement knew they existed. Plain notchback bodies, upgraded cooling, reinforced floors and a certified speedometer made them ideal for chasing down interstate traffic. Decades later, drag racers figured out the same recipe works just as well at the strip, and one of them now runs nine-second passes with a naturally aspirated small block.
Pontiac rated the 1973 Super Duty 455 at 290 net horsepower, a figure most experts believe was deliberately conservative by around 85 horsepower. The engine used a reinforced block, four-bolt mains, forged rods and pistons, and a nitrided crankshaft. Only 252 SD-455 Trans Ams were built that year out of 4,802 total, split 72 manual and 180 automatic. Read on to find out how one engineering team built a genuine muscle car in the year everyone else quit.
Every car on this list has one thing in common: buyers keep paying a premium regardless of what else is happening in the market. Rarity, documented history, and a wave of nostalgia driven demand, especially from younger collectors introduced to these cars through film and pop culture, keep pushing prices for even once affordable muscle cars steadily upward. It is a reminder that horsepower alone was never the whole story.
Fourteen years before muscle cars ruled American roads, Chevrolet was already borrowing parts suppliers from the Corvette line to build a pickup that looked like nothing else on a job site. The Cameo Carrier used fiberglass to hide a stepside bed and invented an entire category in the process. This resto-modded 1957 example carries a modern driveline underneath, and the truck’s real history is more surprising than the smooth flanks suggest.
The 1968 Hemi Barracuda did not just compete in Super Stock drag racing, the NHRA credits it with reshaping the class entirely. Bucky Hess keeps that legacy alive behind the wheel of his hand painted Kandy Kuda, one of the last SS/AH racers still willing to foot-brake a Hemi car deep into the eight second zone. It is old school drag racing discipline in a sport that has moved almost entirely to electronics. Read on to find out why he does it the hard way.
The most expensive Mustang ever sold was never meant to be sold at all. Shelby American built it to destroy experimental Goodyear tires at sustained triple-digit speeds, and when a dealer tried to turn it into a fifty-car production run, exactly one buyer showed up. Five decades later Shelby built a 50th Anniversary Super Snake to mark the occasion. The gap between the two cars says everything about how legends get made.
Dodge built 503 winged Chargers. Plymouth was forced to build nearly four times as many Superbirds. Both cars came out of the same NASCAR rulebook and the same wind tunnel program, yet they ended up with different noses, different wings, different interiors, and very different reputations among collectors today. One of them was measurably faster on the high banks. Read on to find out which, and why the gap was smaller than either camp admits.
A Camaro Z/28 badge once meant a car built to embarrass everything else on the street. By 1980 it meant 190 horsepower, a functional hood scoop and some very loud graphics. Matt Farah drove a restored example and came away more nervous than impressed, and his complaints say a great deal about what the malaise era actually did to American muscle. Read on for what survived and what did not.
George Hansen first saw an Oldsmobile Starfire in a neighbor’s driveway as a boy and spent the next fifty years wanting one. The car he eventually found was Oldsmobile’s answer to the personal luxury market, named after a jet fighter and carrying a 394 cubic-inch V8 rated at 345 horsepower. Read on for what made the Starfire unusual, and why the convertible is the harder version to find.
The quickest vintage Mustang on the planet does not have a carburetor, a camshaft, or an exhaust note. Built from a 1968 fastback by a shop in Austin, Texas, it runs a quarter mile in the nine-second range and holds a top-speed record set over a flying mile. The numbers behind it are strange enough that most people have to read them twice. Read on for what is actually bolted under that sheet metal.