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The 2011 Ford Mustang GT, 2010 Chevrolet Camaro SS and 2010 Dodge Challenger SRT8 gave up horsepower to each other in almost every direction, yet the finishing order at the drag strip was never really in doubt once curb weights entered the picture. One of the three carried nearly 500 pounds more than another. Read on for the numbers, the chassis differences, and why the least powerful car kept winning.
The ‘normal gearbox vs. Fast & Furious gearbox’ meme pokes fun at one of car culture’s favorite running jokes: Hollywood’s wildly exaggerated version of manual shifting. Real muscle car transmissions don’t gain power mid-shift or cycle through a dozen gears in seconds — they reward precision over theatrics. Here’s why the gap between movie shifting and a real four-speed is so much bigger than it looks on screen.
Southern California muscle car owners are used to driving year-round, rain or shine — mostly shine. So when the winter of 2016-17 turned into the wettest stretch the region had seen in years, weekend cruise spots emptied out and garage queens stayed parked. It capped off more than five years of drought in dramatic fashion. Here’s what actually happened, and why a little rain is a bigger deal for classics than it looks.
Chevrolet rated the 1969 Camaro Z/28 at 290 horsepower, a figure that racers who put one on a dyno treated as an inside joke. The car existed to satisfy a racing rulebook rather than a sales brochure, and its 302-cubic-inch V8 was engineered backward from a displacement cap. That understatement explains more about Chevrolet’s ambitions than the sheet metal does. Read on for what was really under the hood.
Dodge arrived at the pony car party six years late and compensated by offering more engines than anyone else, from a 383 all the way to the 426 Hemi. The Challenger R/T was the sharp end of that lineup, and the cars that stayed with one family instead of getting flipped or raced into the ground are now the ones collectors chase hardest. Read on for what made the first-generation car special.
The ‘gas money vs. relationship’ joke is one of the most recycled memes in muscle car culture, and it keeps circulating for a reason — feeding a genuine big-block V8 really can rival a car payment. Classic muscle cars were built in an era when fuel economy was an afterthought and horsepower was everything. Here’s the real cost behind the joke, and why muscle car owners keep sharing it anyway.
Under the faded green paint of this 1972 Chevrolet Nova sits an all-aluminum LS2 stroked to 402 cubic inches, fitted with a dry-sump system and twin Rotrex superchargers making 1,160 horsepower and 825 lb-ft on pump gas. Built by Kurt Urban of Wheel to Wheel Powertrain for owner Dru Diesner, it has run 9.25 at 148 mph at Cordova Dragway Park. Read on to find out why the ugliest car in the lane is usually the one to worry about.
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.
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.