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The sixth-generation Chevrolet Camaro arrived for 2016 on a lighter platform borrowed from Cadillac, with a drive mode setting aimed squarely at the one condition rear-wheel-drive muscle cars are famous for failing. Two hundred fewer pounds, a five-link rear end, and a Snow/Ice program changed the math on whether this car can survive a winter road trip. Read on to find out how much of that actually helps once the pavement disappears.
Dodge pulled 7,802 examples of the 2017 Challenger back to dealerships over a defect that never made a noise, never threw a check-engine light, and never showed up on a test drive. The problem lived entirely in software, and it involved the one thing every driver trusts without thinking: the letter P on the dash. Read on to find out what was actually going wrong inside the transmission.
A muscle car’s front wheels lift completely off the pavement in this shot, and it isn’t an accident or a loss of control. Spring rates and shock valving are doing exactly what they’re tuned to do at the starting line, and wheelie bars exist specifically to cap how far that lift can go. Here’s the suspension science behind why some cars wheelie off the line, and where that same lift turns dangerous.
This 1968 Camaro looks like a tidy first-generation restoration until the timing board lights up: 7.79 seconds at 179 mph, run in Street Outlaw trim at Wild Horse Pass Raceway. A twin-turbocharged combination hides behind factory-style sheet metal, in a chassis that first went on sale more than half a century ago. Read on to find out how builders are extracting purpose-built race car numbers from a body shell most people still think of as a weekend cruiser.
The 1972 Dodge Challenger is the model year enthusiasts tend to skip past, and the reasons are all on the order form. Both big-block options were gone, the convertible was cancelled, and the front end wore a restyle that departed from the original look. Dodge built 26,658 of them, down nearly 11 percent from 1971. Read on to find out why that unloved transitional year is quietly becoming interesting to collectors.
The 1971 Dodge Demon 340 was the cheapest way into real Mopar small-block performance, and it arrived wearing a grinning cartoon devil that drew organized protests from religious groups. Under the hood sat a 275-horsepower 340 good for a 14.49-second quarter mile, in a compact that cost roughly half what a big-block Charger did. Only 10,098 were built before Dodge retired the name. Read on to find out why the joke turned into one of the most sought-after A-bodies of the era.
A Shelby GT350R already sheds weight with carbon wheels and a deleted rear seat, and it still tips the scales around 3,700 pounds. A Wisconsin composites shop offers a fix: replace the entire steel body with carbon fiber. The full treatment costs roughly what the car does. Individual fenders come out under two pounds. Read on for how the pricing tiers break down and where the weight actually goes.
A Pontiac G8 wearing VIN 001 spent years as a low-mileage curiosity in Burt Reynolds’ hands, eventually picking up a prototype Bandit insignia connecting it to the movie that made him famous. By the time it reached the block at Barrett-Jackson West Palm Beach it had covered barely 800 miles on its factory tires. Read on for why a Hollywood legend was standing next to Pontiac’s least flashy sedan.
The man who shaped the 1968 Dodge Charger sculpted the design between official assignments, in clay, as something closer to a personal project than a sanctioned program. It became one of the most recognizable American cars ever built, and he left Detroit shortly afterward without ever styling another production vehicle. Decades later, builders are still reinterpreting his lines in Pro Street form, which is its own kind of credit.
Most show builds are engineered to turn heads for a season. This 1971 Dodge Challenger has been doing it for roughly two decades and still looks like it left the shop last week. Pro Street was a style born from NHRA Pro Stock cars of the early eighties, and getting it to age this well takes more restraint than shock value. Read on for what defines a tubbed car, and why 1971 Challengers made such good raw material.
Rust does not ask permission before it spreads, and by the time it appears on a 1971 Plymouth Cuda’s rocker panels there is a good chance it has already consumed metal you cannot see. On a unibody E-body the rockers are structure, not trim, which means getting the repair wrong can turn a straightforward job into a car that never closes its doors properly again. Read on for what a correct rocker replacement actually involves.
These three overlooked muscle cars all earned obscurity in different ways, from a Hemi Dart built purely for the drag strip to a Rebel Machine unveiled at NHRA’s biggest stage. The Hemi Dart’s 426 engine ran quarter-mile times in the nine-second range not long after leaving the factory, numbers that still hold up decades later. AMC’s Machine countered with a standard 340-horsepower V8 built for straight-line bragging rights of its own. Here’s what made each of these forgotten muscle cars worth a second look.
Robert Wiater spent more than twelve years building his 1970 Chevrolet Impala in a garage in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, and the racing exhaust gives it away before you ever see the car. 1970 was the first year without an Impala SS, even as the big-block 454 replaced the outgoing 427 under the hood. Wiater’s build carries no SS badge, just over a decade of personal labor. Read on for the story behind one retired truck driver’s take on a full-size muscle car most people overlook.