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At the 2017 World of Wheels show in Rosemont, Illinois, Lou Costabile finds a Lightning Blue Roush Stage 3 Mustang that isn’t owned by a collector at all — it’s a rolling partnership between Roush Performance and Meguiar’s Car Care Products. Driver Spike Anderson explains exactly how that arrangement works and why this six-speed, supercharged Mustang exists in the first place. The story behind the car turns out to be as interesting as the car itself.
For decades, the 25-color Paint Chip Cuda existed only as an illustration in a 1970 Plymouth brochure, born from a color war where Mustang offered 15 shades and Camaro 18, and Plymouth answered with 25. Collector Tim Wellborn remembered that illustration from his youth and, in 2016, tracked down a real numbers-matching Cuda in a New Orleans warehouse to finally bring it to life. The result looks like two different muscle cars sharing one body.
A handful of 1969 Camaros left the factory hiding a secret: an aluminum 427 ZL1 engine ordered through a fleet-vehicle paperwork loophole that let dealers dodge GM’s own ban on big blocks in mid-size cars. Only 69 were built, each one costing more in engine surcharge than most base Camaros cost outright. If the blue car above is packing one of these motors, it’s sitting on a small fortune.
Long before Dodge built its own cars, the Dodge brothers ran the machine shop that supplied Henry Ford with complete chassis, engines, and transmissions for his earliest Model A and Model N vehicles. That 1903 handshake deal eventually grew into a 5,000-employee operation capable of building a quarter-million cars a year, before the brothers walked away to found their own company in 1914. It’s a piece of trivia most Ford and Dodge fans never learn.
The 1963 Corvette Sting Ray was a complete reinvention — new chassis, independent rear suspension, hidden headlights, and a split rear window that lasted exactly one model year. Put one in the hands of Alloway’s Hot Rod Shop, a place known nationally for black paint and a stance that looks like it is trying to get under the pavement, and the result is a specific kind of collision between two design philosophies. Read on to find out what makes that combination work.
Nobody at this drag event could identify the mystery vehicle drawing a crowd – until 1320video tracked down the owner and got the hood open. It turns out to be a Local Motors Rally Fighter, essentially a sand rail in body panels, hiding a supercharged LS3 V8. Watch to see it make a pass nobody expected.
Few names are more closely tied to Monster Energy-liveried drift machines than Vaughn Gittin Jr., whose partnership with the brand dates back to 2010 and helped turn a factory Mustang platform into a full-time competition drift car. Formula Drift itself only dates back to 2003, yet muscle car platforms quickly became the backbone of the sport. This image captures exactly the kind of sideways moment that built that reputation.
The 1966 Dodge Charger was strange enough that buyers walked past it on the showroom floor, and Dodge built barely 37,000 of them. Two years later a redesign sold nearly triple the original projection, and within another year the nameplate needed a hand-formed aerodynamic nose just to stay competitive on NASCAR superspeedways. The production numbers behind that turnaround explain more about the Charger than any highlight reel does.
Plymouth built the Road Runner across three closely related seasons before its first major redesign, and the differences between 1968, 1969, and 1970 come down to details easy to miss at a glance – taillight placement, grille bars, even brake hardware. Nailing down the right year matters, too: a 1969 440 Six-Barrel car is one of Plymouth’s rarest factory muscle car packages, with only 1,412 ever built. Can you spot which year this one is?
Nothing about this Corvette’s original build sheet matches what is under its hood today. The factory small-block has given way to a 383 stroker with an upgraded transmission, suspension and cooling system, wearing dark blue metallic paint over a restored leather interior. The stock 1981 engine made 190 horsepower. This one claims 500. Read on for how that gap got closed, and why 1981 was one of the strangest years in Corvette history.
By 1973 the American luxury convertible market had narrowed to exactly one survivor, and the Cadillac Eldorado was it. Lincoln had walked away in 1967 and Chrysler’s Imperial followed a year later, leaving Cadillac alone with a 500-cubic-inch V8, front-wheel drive and no competition to undercut it. Then one of them paced the Indianapolis 500. Read on for what it was really like to own the last of a dying breed.
A 1969 Dodge Charger gets a modern supercharged Hellcat V8 transplant in this build, appropriately named ‘Reverence,’ from the specialists at Cleveland Power & Performance. The test drive captures how a decades-old muscle car icon behaves with more than 700 horsepower now sitting under the hood. Watch to hear exactly what a Hellcat swap sounds like packed into a classic Charger this size.
The 409 might be the only engine in American history sold as much by a pop song as by a marketing department. Chevrolet moved 142 of them in 1961 and more than fifteen thousand the following year, and a Beach Boys B-side released that same summer had a great deal to do with the difference. This black 1962 Impala SS wears the nickname Black Diamond and a 409 under the hood. Read on to find out which version of that engine actually mattered.
An 84mm turbo poking through the grille tells experienced drag racers everything they need to know before the engine fires. This Mustang carries an LS swap and runs in the eight second bracket, which requires roughly four-figure horsepower and a chassis certified to match. Read on for why the boost curve matters more than the peak number, and why consistency is harder to achieve than speed.
The 1970 Boss 302 exists for one reason: Ford needed to beat the Camaro Z/28 in Trans-Am racing, and the rules said it had to sell street versions to do it. The engine that resulted borrowed cylinder head technology from an entirely different Ford engine family to solve a breathing problem, and production more than quadrupled between the first and second model years. Read on to find out what changed, and why the 1970 car is the one enthusiasts chase.