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Two red muscle cars, nose to nose on a race track — an image built to make you pick a side, just like Detroit intended back in the 1960s. GM, Ford, and Chrysler didn’t just build fast cars during the muscle car wars; they manufactured rivalries fans still argue about today. Which one wins your vote?
From 1973 to 1977, Chevrolet let Chevelle Laguna buyers order front seats that swiveled a full 90 degrees toward the open door — an oddly luxurious feature bolted into a car built to chase GTOs and Road Runners. Original upholstery has since become a genuine restoration prize, with worn covers fetching hundreds of dollars. Here’s the story behind one of the strangest factory options in muscle car history.
AMC built its reputation on affordable cars, not horsepower wars, but its V8 architecture turned out to be tougher than anyone at the Big Three expected. Take a guess at what’s under the hood of this blue AMC, then find out why drag racers still build these engines to 700-plus horsepower decades after AMC itself stopped building anything at all.
A full-size Pontiac sedan standing on its rear wheels at the drag strip isn’t something you’d expect to see today, but the 1962 Catalina 421 Super Duty made it a regular occurrence. Built to exploit NHRA homologation rules and driven by racing legends like Jim Wangers, here’s the story behind one of Pontiac’s most audacious factory sleepers, and why its official horsepower rating was almost certainly a lie.
There’s a reason photos of absurdly lifted trucks circulate endlessly through car culture, and it goes back further than most people realize. From WWII-era necessity to Baja desert racing to today’s SEMA showstoppers, here’s how raising a truck off the ground turned into one of the most recognizable movements in the automotive hobby, one dangling passenger at a time.
One stop on the country’s largest touring car event blew past every attendance projection organizers had made, with thousands more vehicles showing up than expected. Trace the Hot Rod Power Tour’s growth from a 1995 magazine road trip into a seven-city phenomenon, and find out exactly what happened the day it rolled into Gateway Motorsports Park outside St. Louis.
Dodge only built a handful of 1970 Challenger R/Ts with the exotic N94 fiberglass hood, and Mopar researchers have traced just one that paired it with the 426 Hemi. Born from Trans-Am racing homologation rules, this option vanished from order sheets almost as fast as it appeared. Here’s the story behind one of the rarest hood-and-engine combinations Dodge ever offered, and why collectors still chase it decades later.
The 1970 Dodge Charger R/T’s 440 Magnum never got the magazine glory that the 426 Hemi did, but it delivered nearly all the same street performance with far less hassle and a lower price tag. Only about 10,337 R/Ts were built that year out of nearly 50,000 total Chargers. Here’s why the ‘lesser’ big block still earns so much respect from Mopar fans.
A 1966 Chevrolet Bel Air was Chevrolet’s plain, budget-friendly full-size sedan — never intended to compete with the flashier Impala, let alone chase four-digit horsepower numbers. One heavily modified Swedish example did exactly that anyway, reportedly built around a rear-mounted turbo setup. Here’s what it typically takes to turn a factory Bel Air into that kind of machine.
The second-generation Buick Riviera changed so little between 1968 and 1969 that even longtime owners argue over which model year a given car actually is. The differences come down to grille patterns, marker lights, and where the reverse lights sit — small details that are easy to mix and match over fifty years. Here’s how to actually tell the two model years apart.
There is a reason serious street machine builders keep coming back to the 1966 Nova: it is lighter than almost anything else GM sold, and it fits a big-block engine like it was born to run one. Steve Holcomb’s build takes that formula and runs with it in every direction at once. The result is a car that looks impossibly clean until it moves — and then it becomes something else entirely.
If you had to pick the five greatest American muscle car engines of the 1960s, could you do it? This video makes a serious attempt, and the arguments it builds for each choice are hard to argue with. Whether you are a Hemi loyalist, a big-block Chevy guy, or a Ford man, at least one of these selections is going to start a fight — and that is exactly the point.
Only 70 Dodge Charger Daytonas were ever built with the fabled 426 Hemi under that towering rear wing — a car engineered purely to win NASCAR races Dodge was otherwise losing. Owner Tom Lembeck’s example is one of the rarest survivors of that aerodynamic experiment. Here’s the history behind the wing, the nose cone, and the engine that made it all worthwhile.
In 2015, Ford and Chevrolet finally built pony cars close enough in horsepower that bragging rights came down to feel rather than spec sheets. The Mustang GT’s independent rear suspension made it the more composed daily driver, while the Camaro SS answered with sharper, more connected handling. Here’s how the two actually stacked up once the engines stopped arguing.
A 1973 Plymouth Road Runner wasn’t built for anything resembling a European road trip — it was a detuned, emissions-strangled shadow of the muscle car it used to be. Yet a retired NHRA and AHRA drag racer took one across Europe and the former Soviet Bloc, not once, but three times. Here’s what made this unlikely combination work.