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Hurst planned to build fifty R-Code Mustangs and finished sixteen. That shortfall alone makes this Oxford White and Hurst Gold car one of the rarest modern muscle cars carrying a legendary name, but the Kenne Bell supercharger bolted to its Coyote V8 is the part that separates it from anything a Ford dealer ever sold. A claimed 750 horsepower against a factory rating of 435 is not a tune. It is a different car wearing the same sheet metal.
This gold 1970 Chevelle wears SS trim over a 350 bored to 355 cubic inches, an Edelbrock carburetor, headers and a Flowmaster exhaust, plus Vintage Air and 17-inch wheels. It is a genuinely appealing driver, but the 1970 SS package tells a stricter story than most listings admit. Chevrolet did not offer a small block under an SS badge that year. Read on for what that means for the car and its value.
A black and gold Pontiac Firebird Trans Am built in the image of Smokey and the Bandit sold for $275,000 at Barrett-Jackson in Scottsdale, and Burt Reynolds drove it onto the block himself. It was not the first one he sold, and it was nowhere near the last. The car underneath the paint had almost nothing in common with a 1977 Trans Am. Read on for what buyers were really paying for.
Loving muscle cars and actually owning one are two very different financial commitments, and a full restoration can run anywhere from $40,000 to well past $70,000 before a car ever turns a wheel. The costs that catch first-time buyers off guard are rarely the ones they planned for. Read on to find out where the real money goes, and why so many enthusiasts stay muscle car guys in spirit only.
The 2017 Dodge Challenger GT quietly did something none of its muscle car ancestors ever managed: it put real power down on wet and snow-covered pavement without sacrificing the long hood and retro fastback shape that make a Challenger a Challenger. Built around a V6 rather than a Hemi and borrowing all-wheel-drive hardware already proven on the Charger and 300, it opened the pony car up to a buyer who’d never seriously considered one before. Read on to find out how Dodge pulled it off.
Bolt a modern LS V8 into a 1956 Chevy and you have built a hot rod. Bolt that same body to an Art Morrison GT Sport chassis and you have built something closer to a modern sports car wearing a vintage suit. Frank Devlin built his 210 in honor of the brother who taught him to drive in one, and the engineering underneath is decades newer than the sheet metal above it. Read on for what actually gets replaced, and how much of the original car survives a build like this.
Every horsepower figure printed on a 1960s muscle car brochure was a negotiation between engineering and marketing, and both sides cheated. Some engines were inflated on paper to win showroom arguments. Others were deliberately understated to slip past insurance underwriters and racing sanctioning bodies. Sorting out which classic muscle cars actually made the most power means throwing out the window sticker entirely and looking at what these engines really did. Read on to find out which numbers hold up.
Walk the floor at the Detroit Autorama and you will see hundreds of builds fighting for attention with chrome, candy paint, and glass-smooth bodywork. Then there is the one that does the opposite: flat black, low, and radiating enough menace that one videographer said he approached it carefully. Under that deliberately unglamorous finish sits a genuine Dodge R5 NASCAR-spec engine with no business being in a street car at all. Watch to see why this 1970 Charger stole the show.
A turbocharged Fox Body Mustang making a claimed 1,200 horsepower walked into a Street Car Takeover event and beat a twin turbo Coyote swapped Mustang that ran an 8.21 second quarter mile in the same final. That is a car from the Reagan administration outrunning modern factory engineering on modern tires. The Fox platform keeps producing results like this for reasons that have very little to do with luck, and a great deal to do with weight, architecture, and thirty years of aftermarket development.
Ford received more than 6,800 applications for exactly 500 build slots on the new GT, and it hand-picked every buyer who made the cut. Getting an allocation was never about writing the biggest check. Jay Leno’s decade-plus history with the original 2005 GT gave him a case most applicants could not match, and when his car arrived in Shadow Black with Competition Orange stripes, he skipped the press junket entirely and pointed his own camera at it. Read on for what that application process actually required.
A stock-looking Honda hiding a turbo or supercharger under the hood has become its own kind of status symbol in car culture, precisely because nobody expects it. Real sleeper builds keep everything visible completely stock while investing everything under the surface, a tradition with roots stretching back to factory big-block muscle cars. Read on to find out what actually separates a convincing sleeper from a paint-and-decal poser.
Ten reveals hit the floor of the 2017 New York International Auto Show, from a twin-turbo Lincoln Navigator shedding 200 pounds to Honda’s unprecedented three-way electric, hybrid, and hydrogen bet on the Clarity nameplate. A few aisles over, Dodge quietly stole the spotlight with a burnout demonstration previewing the Challenger SRT Demon. Not every debut that grabbed headlines that week turned out to matter years later. Read on to find out which ones actually reshaped their segments.
Somewhere on I-29, at a heads-up no-prep event, a family hauler with two baby seats in the back lined up against purpose-built race cars, then drove itself home afterward. That alone would be a decent story. But the horsepower number this Dodge Charger Hellcat put down on E85 and bolt-on parts alone is the kind of figure that makes seasoned drag racers do a double take. Watch to see the run, and the reaction times, for yourself.
Tom Lembeck bought two identical 2016 Dodge Charger SRT Hellcats, new, because one apparently was not enough. Each carries 707 horsepower, a supercharged 6.2-liter HEMI, and two key fobs that make it two different cars depending on which one you use. Dodge marketed it as the quickest, fastest, most powerful production sedan in the world. Read on for what makes the four-door version the strangest one in the lineup.
Dodge claimed the 2018 Challenger SRT Demon would launch harder than any production car ever had, and it made that claim before a single customer car reached a dragstrip. The number that mattered was not peak horsepower, it was what happened in the first 150 milliseconds after the driver released the TransBrake. Only 3,000 were built for the United States. Read on for how the whole car was engineered around a single moment.