 |
Built in the year everyone blames for killing the muscle car, this all-black 1971 Pontiac Firebird Formula 455 still hides real teeth: a 335-horse HO big block, 480 lb-ft of torque, and a heavy-duty three-speed for anyone who ordered it to be driven hard. Overshadowed by its Trans Am sibling’s spoilers and stripes, the Formula was and remains the second-gen Firebird’s best-kept sleeper secret.
Air Flow Research built V8BUILDS to answer a question every gearhead has quietly asked at a static car show: how would these things actually run? The autocross-and-show hybrid started small at Willow Springs International Raceway before outgrowing itself, and its next stop lands at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana. Classic muscle, resto-mods, pro touring builds, and V8-swapped imports are all welcome on the cone course — because at V8BUILDS, the only membership requirement is a V8 doing real work under the hood.
A plain-looking yellow two-door hides one of Mopar’s best-kept secrets: 1966 was the only year Plymouth let ordinary buyers order the legendary 426 Street Hemi in a Belvedere. Born out of a NASCAR homologation fight and rated at 425 horsepower, it turned a mid-size family car into a genuine street terror — and did it in staggeringly small numbers. Whether this particular car is running the real thing or just wearing the look, it’s a reminder that some of the era’s wildest engineering hid behind the most modest badges.
Growing up in the Pomona Valley during the early 1970s meant living down the block from guys who ran real Funny Cars and Top Fuel dragsters — rock stars, as far as any gearhead kid was concerned. The gasser look this 1969 Chevelle wears traces back to NHRA’s old Gas Coupe & Sedan classes, a straight-axle, nose-high style that had already faded from official competition by the time this car got built. SoCal builders never let it die, though, keeping the stance and the attitude alive as a backyard tradition long after the sanctioning bodies moved on.
The first Shelby Super Snake was a 600-horsepower one-off built to promote Goodyear tires, and Ford turned down the chance to put it into production. Four decades later, Shelby brought the name back as a real conversion program, and this Las Vegas-built GT500 is one of the results. Here is the story behind the badge.
Lou Costabile gets a first-production 2017 Ford GT walkthrough from Ford’s Jim Owens at Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale, tracing the supercar’s design straight back to the GT40’s Le Mans wins over Ferrari. Form follows function isn’t a slogan here — it’s literally how the car was engineered. See why Ford built its most extreme car in decades.
Barrett-Jackson’s Scottsdale week has a way of setting the tone for where muscle car money is headed each year, and 2017 was no exception. With 1,719 vehicles crossing the block and 40 sales records falling, the results revealed which corners of the market were heating up — and which classics were starting to share the spotlight with unexpected competition. A Shelby GT350 and a Boss 429 both cracked six figures, but the real headline was who else was cashing in.
Jamboolio catches a 1968 Dodge Charger R/T and its 440 Magnum V8 firing up at a 2017 car meet in Kotka, Finland — proof that American muscle car culture never stayed confined to Detroit. Hear what a well-kept RB-series big block sounds like an ocean from its original parts supply. Watch for the startup that needed no translation.
This 1966 Chevelle convertible skips the trailer-queen treatment in favor of being a genuinely great driver, and it’s got the pedigree to back it up. The original ’66 redesign gave Chevelle its iconic coke-bottle shape and spawned the SS 396, of which only 5,429 convertibles were ever built. This particular car swaps in a supercharged LSX for modern muscle, wrapped in a custom interior and a stance that nails the look.
The Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat proved Detroit could still build something genuinely unhinged — a four-door family sedan packing a supercharged 707-horsepower HEMI, an 11-second quarter-mile, and a top speed north of 200 mph, all with room for the kids in back. It’s the kind of factory-built lunacy that makes old-school muscle car fans grin, because somebody at Dodge clearly understood the assignment.
Lou Costabile visits the Barrett-Jackson Collection Showroom in Scottsdale to check out a 1972 Chevrolet Camaro SS finished in the divisive Gulf Green, powered by a numbers-matching 350 small block. Showroom associate Mike Hoye walks through what makes this final-year first-generation SS worth a serious look. Watch for the start-up that seals the deal.
Don Yenko made his name in the 1960s by out-engineering General Motors” own rulebook, cramming Corvette engines into Camaros the factory never intended to build. Decades later, a modern tuner revived the badge and aimed it squarely at Dodge”s newest muscle car icon with a custom supercharged V8 pushing toward four-digit horsepower. Here is how a 1969 loophole and a 2017 supercharger ended up telling the same story.
This 1969 Dodge Charger isn’t a restoration – it’s a transplant, with the classic fastback body dropped directly onto the chassis of a 2016 Challenger SRT Hellcat. That donor brought along a 707-horsepower supercharged HEMI, modern suspension, and a thoroughly contemporary interior, all wrapped in unmistakable late-1960s sheet metal. The build sits at the center of a growing restomod trend that trades numbers-matching purity for something that can actually keep up with modern traffic.
This 1977 Pontiac Firebird Esprit in Buckskin Gold carries a direct link to The Rockford Files, the car James Garner’s character made famous on TV. But its history runs deeper than a screen connection – a mid-1977 factory supply shortage quietly swapped the engine spec partway through the model year. Add the redesigned square-headlight front end and rare option packages like Skybird, and this Esprit turns out to be more complicated than its laid-back reputation suggests.
Most pony car underdogs stay underdogs – but this one didn’t. AMC handed its ailing Trans-Am program to Roger Penske and driver Mark Donohue, and within a season they’d turned the Javelin into a genuine giant-killer, taking the fight straight to Ford and Chevrolet on their own turf. By 1971 Donohue was winning nearly every race he entered, and AMC walked away with a manufacturer’s championship nobody saw coming. Here’s how a car built on a shoestring became one of Trans-Am’s most dominant machines.