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Mike O’Toole nearly sent this Tahoe Turquoise 1966 Mustang hardtop to the junkyard before deciding to restore it instead. It’s a survivor from a model year when Ford built over 607,000 Mustangs and hardtops made up more than 80 percent of them – a production pace that helped the Mustang claim over 7 percent of the entire U.S. car market. Here’s what made 1966 such a pivotal year for Ford’s pony car.
This award-winning 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air wears a custom Blue Heaven paint job, but the real story is under the hood. Chevrolet’s rare Rochester Ramjet fuel-injected 283 made 283 horsepower in 1957 — good for one horsepower per cubic inch — and only about 1,530 Bel Airs left the factory with it. That same engine got a Chevy sedan banned from NASCAR that year. Whatever’s powering this custom, it’s chasing a one-year-only legend.
A chance encounter with a brand-new Oxford White 2014 Mustang GT while cruising in a 1987 5.0 turned into an unexpected lesson in just how far Ford’s small-block had evolved. The Fox-body’s 225-horsepower pushrod V8 and the Coyote’s 420-horsepower DOHC screamer share a name and a displacement, but almost nothing else under the surface. What one owner discovered comparing them side by side says a lot about a quarter-century of Mustang engineering, and about the friendships that get built around cars like these.
1976 was the last year Pontiac dared to build a real big-block muscle car, and this Trans Am is a rare survivor of that final stand. Backed by the numbers-matching 455 V8 and a genuine four-speed manual, it’s the kind of drivetrain combination most buyers skipped in favor of the easier automatic. Add in an untouched original interior and you’ve got a driver-quality time capsule from the twilight of an era.
This sunflower yellow 1970 Chevy Yenko Deuce Nova earned the nickname ‘mini muscle car’ from the crew at V8TV’s Muscle Car Of The Week — and it’s not even the first one they’ve featured. Built around a tuned 350 small block rather than Don Yenko’s famous 427 big-block conversions, it offered a lighter, quicker alternative during the muscle car era.
Chevrolet fitted the Corvette with a full chrome bumper for the very last time in 1972, right before federal rules changed the car’s face forever. Buried within that model year’s production numbers sit two remarkably rare configurations that few collectors ever get to see side by side. Discover why only a handful of buyers ever combined the track-focused LT1 engine with factory air conditioning.
A single SCCA rule change in 1970 forced Chevrolet to swap the Z/28’s small homologation-special engine for the Corvette’s LT1 350, reshaping one of the most respected nameplates in muscle car history. A delayed February launch compressed the entire selling season and left Chevrolet with just 8,733 units built that year. Read on to find out why this specific model year still matters to collectors.
The Mercury Cougar spent its first two years cultivating a reputation as the polished, upscale alternative to the Mustang — until the Eliminator package arrived in 1969 and deliberately wrecked that image. With engines ranging up to the 428 Cobra Jet and genuine Trans-Am racing pedigree, it proved the Cougar could fight. Read on to find out why this short-lived package remains one of the era’s most overlooked performance packages.
The SRT Demon captured headlines with 840 horsepower and a waiting list that filled overnight, but Dodge had quietly been selling something nearly as ferocious for years before the Demon ever existed. The Challenger SRT Hellcat skips the race fuel, the stripped interior, and the six-figure markups while still delivering 707 horsepower you can drive to work. Read on to find out why buyers chasing supercharged Hemi drama might already have the better deal.
Lowrider culture was born on the boulevards of East Los Angeles, built by car clubs who turned full-size sedans into rolling art with hydraulics and candy paint decades before the rest of the country noticed. So how did a chromed-out Oldsmobile 98 end up cruising a street in Brooklyn instead? Read on to find out how a West Coast movement built its own history on the opposite coast.
Pontiac never built a 428-cubic-inch Firebird, which makes this 1967 convertible’s engine bay a genuine puzzle until you realize the builder stayed entirely within Pontiac’s own performance parts family. Backed by a four-speed manual and topped with Edelbrock aluminum heads, this is a big-inch build with a cleaner pedigree than most cross-brand engine swaps. Read on to find out where that 428 actually came from.
Only 1,325 of the 22,229 Corvettes Chevrolet built for 1964 left the factory with the L84 fuel-injected 327 under the hood, and fewer still survive as numbers-matching convertibles. Owners Bob Atkins and Fred Haraf have kept this silver-on-black example since 2011, and they know exactly what separates a genuine fuelie from a car wearing the right badges and nothing else. Read on to find out what makes this 375-horsepower Sting Ray one of the rarest combinations Chevrolet ever built.
Dodge’s High Impact color palette hit showrooms in the summer of 1969, and Hemi Orange became the color everyone remembers, whether you call it orange or something closer to red depending on the light. This head-to-head pits that factory boldness against the opposite approach, a blacked-out Charger built to let its fastback lines do the talking instead. Both looks came out of the same wild era of Mopar styling. Only one of them is genuinely rare enough to command real money today.
Carroll Shelby’s small California shop produced two of the most valuable nameplates in American car history, the race-honed Shelby Mustang and the V8-powered Cobra roadster that started it all. Fewer than a thousand genuine Cobras were ever built, compared to tens of thousands of replicas made since. Read on to find out what actually separates a real Shelby from everything built to look like one.
Most Dodge Chargers on the show circuit are preserved for their paint and their numbers-matching pedigree. This orange number 01 Charger takes the opposite approach, built specifically to slide sideways through dirt track corners against a field of competitors with the same obsession. Read on to find out what it actually takes to turn a classic Mopar into a dedicated dirt racer.