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Fifty years of muscle car culture have never agreed on what makes a car ‘hot’ – raw factory horsepower, a numbers-matching restoration, or a modern resto-mod build. This deep red machine parked outside a garage door raises that same debate all over again. Is it the stance, the sound, or the story behind it that decides the verdict? See where this one lands and decide for yourself.
One jump – sixteen feet high, eighty-two feet long – made this orange Charger more famous than the show itself. More than 320 identical cars were destroyed getting that stunt on film, and the welded-shut doors weren’t a style choice; they were what was left after the abuse this car was built to take.
This convertible’s color and stripe combination are the easy part of the guessing game – the real question is what’s under the hood. If it’s the LS6, you’re looking at one of just 4,475 ever built, an engine strong enough to beat a Road Runner 440 Six Pack and a Torino Cobra 429 in period Motor Trend testing.
The Ford Capri and the Mustang share a designer and a mission – but only one of them is still in production after more than fifty years. The Capri’s last-ever example, the 280 ‘Brooklands,’ was one of just 1,038 built, and driving it back to back with a modern Mustang GT reveals exactly why one nameplate survived and the other didn’t.
A meme with four simple words – ‘real men drive luxury cars’ – sets up an expectation it has no intention of honoring. The payoff is a supercharged monster instead, and researchers who study car culture say the joke works because it taps into decades-old ideas about power, status, and who’s supposed to be behind the wheel.
Dodge built roughly 29,800 Challengers for 1971. Just 71 of them left the factory with the 426 Hemi, and 1971 was the last year the street Hemi was offered at all. A dual-quad R/T like this one is not simply a rare Challenger — it is the closing page of one of the most famous engine programs Detroit ever ran. Here is what made the Hemi so scarce, so expensive, and so difficult to live with.
In 1970, the major American manufacturers were still building cars without significant emissions or fuel economy constraints, and the result was a showroom floor that would be illegal in its current form by 1973. V8TV’s Muscle Car of the Week episode #201 digs into the ten quickest cars of that year as reported by the automotive press, pairing historical quarter-mile data with examples from The Brothers Collection. The numbers are still remarkable more than fifty years later.
In 2016, the muscle car market was shrinking almost everywhere except one corner of it – Hellcat sales climbed nearly 70 percent while overall Challenger and Charger volumes both fell. The family SUV mentioned almost in passing in this piece would eventually get the same supercharged treatment, at a price tag nobody saw coming back then.
Everyone who sees a 1955 Ford F-100 like this one says roughly the same thing before anything else registers. What is less obvious is what trucks like it were originally built to survive, and why the term shop truck carries a specific history that has nothing to do with paint. Ford redesigned the half-ton for 1955 and gave it an all-new V8, and the results still set the template for the style. Read on for what made this the year to start with.
A 174-day labor strike at Chevrolet’s Norwood plant nearly ended the Camaro entirely in 1972, and roughly 1,100 partially assembled cars were scrapped outright because they could not meet the next year’s bumper rules. What survived that year became the rarest Z/28 of the second generation, with just 2,575 built. On steel Rally wheels and raised white letter tires, it looks exactly as it did on a 1972 showroom floor. Read on to find out how close this car came to never existing.
A 1970 Plymouth ‘Cuda with a Cummins turbodiesel under the hood sounds like a punchline until you see the build quality and the dyno numbers behind it. Weaver Customs channeled and chopped the body, dropped it onto a Roadster Shop chassis, and fitted the kind of drivetrain nobody expects in an E-body. The result has collected hardware at serious Mopar events. Read on to find out why the ‘Torc’ works so much better than it should.
A naturally aspirated Mustang built to embarrass cars twice its price versus a supercharged Camaro with 136 more horsepower, settled by a professional driver on a real road course in Arizona. The lap times came back 2.45 seconds apart, and the reason had less to do with the horsepower gap than with what was inside each car’s shock absorbers. The result exposed how much modern damper technology actually buys you.
A 1964 Ford F-100 left Dearborn as a work truck for farmers and tradesmen. This one has a chopped roof, a hole cut through the hood, and a flame job loud enough to be heard from the next aisle over. What makes 1964 the right year to start with is a construction change Ford made that year, one most builders never think about. Read on for what Ford changed and why it matters to anyone cutting one up.
A supercharged 6.2-liter Camaro ZL1 against a supercharged 6.2-liter Challenger Hellcat should have been the definitive answer to an argument that has run for decades. The Hellcat has 57 more horsepower. The ZL1 gives away 566 pounds. The manufacturer quarter-mile figures and the 0-60 figures point in opposite directions. Then the actual race happened and satisfied nobody at all. Read on for why the spec sheet and the strip disagreed.
The 2017 New York International Auto Show had plenty of new metal on the floor, but one car made everything around it look conservative. Dodge brought a production Challenger engineered almost entirely around a single number on a drag strip timeslip, and it was willing to delete parts of the interior to get there. Read on to find out what Dodge actually built, and why the NHRA banned it before anyone bought one.