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Ford quietly swapped engines mid-year on the 1968 Shelby GT500, and the change turned an already potent muscle car into a legend. Early cars carried the proven 428 Police Interceptor, good for a genuine 360 horsepower, before Ford dropped in the underrated 428 Cobra Jet and renamed the car GT500KR, King of the Road. Only 1,570 KR models were built that year, split between fastbacks and convertibles.
The 426 Hemi wasn’t just Plymouth’s biggest engine option in 1970 — it was a race-bred monster so brutal it got banned from NASCAR before ever touching a road course. Only 666 ‘Cuda buyers checked that option box, and just 14 of those cars left the factory as convertibles. Beneath the shaking hood scoop and the low idle rumble sits 425 horsepower and 490 lb-ft of torque that still turns heads at every cruise-in. Here’s what made the Hemi ‘Cuda’s V8 one of muscle car history’s most unforgettable powerplants.
Pontiac built exactly eight 1969 Firebird Trans Am convertibles, and V8TV has now featured every single one of them, including this fourth car, the one with the lowest VIN sequence number of the group. The eighth car in the set went missing for years before finally surfacing and getting restored in 2016. See what makes this particular Trans Am worth a second look inside an already impossibly rare set of eight.
Aftermarket transbrakes have been a drag-strip staple for decades, but no manufacturer had ever built one into a car straight from the factory floor — until Dodge did. Here is how the system locks multiple clutches at once to hold a car dead-still under full throttle, and what that means for reaction times once the light goes green. The engineering behind this one feature says more about the muscle car horsepower wars than most spec sheets ever could.
This Rally Red 1970 Coronet R/T convertible was built during the model’s final year, and only 14 buyers that year checked the one option box that made a Coronet R/T genuinely rare. Whether this car is one of those fourteen or a well-optioned 440 example, it’s a snapshot of a nameplate on its way out. Read on to find out what buyers actually chose, and why almost none of them chose the exotic option.
Plymouth’s 1969.5 Road Runner A12 traded the expensive 426 Hemi for three two-barrel carburetors, a lift-off fiberglass hood, and a genuinely stripped-down attitude – no hubcaps included. Only 615 were built, split between automatic and 4-speed manual transmissions, backed by a 390-horsepower 440 that could turn high-12-second quarter miles in period testing. It was Plymouth’s answer for buyers who wanted Hemi-level intimidation without the Hemi-level invoice.
Everyone remembers the black-and-gold 1979 Trans Am, but this Van Nuys-built example skipped that costume for something far rarer: a one-year-only shade called Atlantis Blue. Built during the Trans Am’s best-selling year ever, it could be optioned with the 400-cubic-inch V8 and 4-speed manual or the smaller 403 depending on the build. Decades later, its rarity – not its fame – is what makes this particular Trans Am worth a second look.
This navy blue 1980 Pontiac Trans Am hides one of Pontiac’s boldest engineering gambles under its shaker scoop: a turbocharged 301 V8, the first forced-induction production V8 built in America. Only about 6,000 of these turbo-equipped Trans Ams were built, every one of them running an automatic and factory air conditioning by necessity. It’s a car that proved horsepower could survive the fuel-crisis era, even if it had to get there through a turbocharger instead of extra cubic inches. Rare, transitional, and easy to overlook.
This 1968 lineup photo puts three very different Dodges side by side: the lightweight Dart GTS, the full-size Coronet R/T, and the radically styled Charger R/T. Each one represented a different bet on what muscle car buyers wanted that year, light weight and agility, big-block brute force, or head-turning design. The Coronet R/T’s Hemi option was built in numbers so small that survivors are among the rarest Mopars around today. Which one would you have driven off the lot in 1968?
Rumors chasing the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon”s horsepower figure climbed past 900 before SRT”s engineers ever finished their own testing. When the official SAE-certified number finally landed, it told a different story — one backed by an NHRA-certified quarter-mile run instead of internet speculation. Here is what the real number turned out to be, and why it did not need any exaggeration to make history.
Only 4,116 examples of the AMC AMX left the factory for 1970, making it the rarest and final year of a two-seat muscle car most casual fans have never heard of. Under its long hood sat a 360-cubic-inch V8 and a four-speed capable of running into the low-14s in the quarter mile. Read on to find out why this scrappy independent’s forgotten sleeper still deserves a spot alongside the era’s more famous names.
Lou Costabile found something rare at Rosemont’s World of Wheels show: a 1972 Corvette Stingray in Cascade Green paint, still with the same owner who bought it new nearly 50 years ago. No restoration story, no reconstruction guesswork — just one person’s decision, repeated for five decades, to keep the car instead of selling it. Viewers are already calling it one of the best ’72s they’ve ever seen. Watch to hear the full story behind the color and the miles.
A single red convertible on a showroom floor kicked off one of Detroit’s fiercest rivalries — and the car everyone assumes won wasn’t the one that actually won in 1955. Ford’s Thunderbird and Chevy’s Corvette arrived within a year of each other, aimed at the same buyer, but built on opposite ideas of what a “sports car” should be. One offered two-seat purity; the other offered a V8, power windows, and comfort. The sales gap between them that year still stuns people who assume the Corvette always ruled.
Chevy built the 1972 Nova during the leanest years of the muscle car era, when the hottest factory SS you could get made a modest 200 horsepower. This one ignores that history entirely, packing a 408 cubic inch small-block under a stunning orange metallic shell, more than double what Chevrolet ever offered in this body style. It’s a textbook Pro Touring build: vintage Nova looks with a powertrain the factory never dreamed of.
Everyone assumes Pontiac invented the mid-size muscle car formula and the rest of Detroit just copied the homework — except Buick found a clever way around GM’s own displacement rules and almost nobody gives the brand credit for it. The result, culminating in the 1970 GSX and a quarter-mile time Motor Trend called the fastest they’d ever tested, remains one of the most underrated muscle cars of the entire era. Read on to find out which loophole Buick exploited first.