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Renderings of a modern Ford Torino keep circulating online, and the reason has less to do with the artwork than with the original car’s unfinished story. Ford’s intermediate muscle car won a Car of the Year award, rewrote NASCAR aerodynamics, and then vanished into a badge nobody remembers. Read on for what the real Torino was, why it disappeared, and why no production revival has ever been confirmed.
Nothing turns heads at a muscle car meet like a hard launch that lifts the front wheels clean off the pavement. It looks like pure chaos, but the physics behind a wheelstand actually explain why some of the fastest cars in the lineup do it on purpose. Here is what is really happening in that split second before the tires touch back down.
One leaked photograph ended months of teasing and set up the strangest product launch in modern muscle car history. The Dodge Challenger SRT Demon arrived with 840 horsepower, drag radials on all four corners, a single seat as standard and a rulebook problem at the NHRA. Here is what Dodge actually built, why it was banned before deliveries started, and why only around 3,300 exist.
A Nassau Blue 1966 Corvette roadster carrying the L72 427, factory-rated at 425 horsepower and 460 lb-ft of torque, headlines Episode 213 of V8TV’s Muscle Car of the Week. The car comes from The Brothers Collection, and viewers split over whether visible exhaust smoke points to needed engine work or whether the car is still a near-perfect judged example. See which side of that debate holds up.
A vividly painted convertible glowing in the sunset light has readers split on whether it is a bold custom win or a paint choice gone too far. Purple has always been a rare sight on muscle cars, historically overshadowed by louder factory reds and High Impact Mopar colors, which makes this one impossible to ignore either way. Cast your vote before scrolling down to see what everyone else thinks.
Some cars are rare because a manufacturer decided to make them rare. The 1971 Challenger R/T with the 426 Hemi is rare because almost nobody would pay for it, and then the option vanished before anyone realized what was ending. Roughly 70 were built that year, all hardtops, all with the shaker hood as standard equipment. Finished in triple black, this is about as intimidating as the configuration gets. Read on to find out what actually killed the elephant motor.
A wildly painted cab-style classic at a car show has readers debating its exact year, make, and model, and the clues are easy to miss if you do not know what to look for. This body style was common across several trim levels in the mid-1950s, which is exactly why fleet buyers loved it. See if you can spot the details that give this one away.
Ford put its 429 big-block under a Mustang hood for exactly one model year, and only a sliver of 1971 production actually got it. Fewer still received the Drag Pack that turned a Cobra Jet into a Super Cobra Jet — four-bolt mains, big-valve heads, and an 11.3:1 compression ratio that demanded premium fuel and a careful hand. This Mach 1 is one of them. Read on for the numbers behind one of the rarest Mustang combinations Ford ever shipped.
This 1959 Ford F100 short bed still runs its original 223-cubic-inch straight six backed by a three-speed manual, riding on Cragar SS mags and white letter tires. It comes from the model year Ford stopped outsourcing four-wheel-drive conversions to Marmon-Herrington and started building its own 4×4 pickups in house. Roughly 157,000 F-100s were built that season across every body style Ford offered. Read on to find out why an unmodified base-model work truck has become one of the harder things to find.
Eighteen finalists paraded through the Ohio Expo Center that Friday, each vying for one of the most coveted titles in the street machine world. Goodguys’ PPG Nationals is the organization’s largest annual event, and the walk from outdoor display to indoor judging is where Street Machine of the Year contenders make their final case. Recent winners have ranged from a twin-turbocharged Buick Grand National to a meticulously restored ’67 Mustang, showing just how wide the caliber of competition has become. Only one build from this parade would leave with the trophy.
Chevrolet built the supercharged 6.2-liter LS9 for exactly one car, the 638-horsepower Corvette ZR1, and then builders started putting it in 1969 Camaros. The engine is the easy part; it already has forged internals, dry-sump oiling, and an Eaton blower. Everything the factory bolted around a 1969 unibody is what has to be replaced to survive it. Read on to find out what an LS9 swap actually demands underneath the sheet metal.
Two black Chevrolets separated by fifty years: a 1969 Chevelle SS, whose performance package cost 348 dollars as an option box, and a 2017 Camaro ZL1 with 650 supercharged horsepower and a 198 mph top speed. The modern car wins every measurable contest, and it is not close. But the comparison gets far more interesting once you look at what each car cost relative to everything else on sale that year. Read on to find out which one was the better deal.
February 2017 produced a pony car sales result almost nobody predicted: the Dodge Challenger, on a platform already a decade old, comfortably outsold the freshly redesigned Chevrolet Camaro while the Ford Mustang took the month outright. The numbers said something uncomfortable about what buyers actually want from a muscle car. Read on for the figures and what they revealed about the segment.
This full-size Mopar spent the late 1960s as the most common sight in American police fleets, chosen by departments from coast to coast over anything Ford or GM offered. Under the skin sat heavy-duty everything: reinforced suspension, semi-metallic brakes, and an electrical system built to run radios and light bars all shift long. Buyers could option as little as a 230-horsepower 318 or as much as a 375-horsepower 440 wedge. See if you can identify the year, make, and model wearing the badge.
Dodge spent months teasing the 2018 Challenger SRT Demon before admitting what it had actually built: a factory drag car with 840 horsepower, one seat, and a set of DOT-legal drag radials. The NHRA reacted before the car ever reached a customer. Read on for what the Demon really was, why only about 3,300 were built, and what those cars are worth now.