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Carroll Shelby’s 1965 GT350 was a 306-horsepower race car with a license plate, and it earned three straight SCCA B-Production championships to prove it. Fifty years later Ford revived the name on a Mustang with a high-revving flat-plane V8, a manual transmission, and a suspension tuned for the track. Parked side by side, the two cars look nothing alike, but they share one uncompromising mission. Read on to find out whether the new car truly earns the badge.
A 1958 Ford Ranchero isn’t the car you’d expect to see wearing a roll bar and side pipes, but that’s exactly what makes this Pro Street build worth talking about. Ford’s second-year hauler borrowed its facelift from the Thunderbird and offered up to 300 horsepower from a fresh 352 V8, hardly the stuff of drag strip legend. Someone clearly disagreed. Take a look at how this family grocery-getter got the full strip-brawler treatment.
Ford barely touched the Thunderbird for 1963, and that was the point: a design that was still selling strong even with a brand-new Buick Riviera gunning for the same buyers. Underneath, a 300-horsepower 390 V8 or an optional 340-horsepower tri-power version gave the personal-luxury cruiser real muscle, while just 455 ultra-rare Sports Roadsters rolled off the line that year. It’s the kind of confident, understated machine that still turns heads at shows today.
Built on a 2008 Crown Victoria Police Interceptor chassis and wearing a 1985 Ford F-150 bullnose body on top, this SEMA 2016 street truck combines Eaton springs, a Metco Motorsports billet rear four-link, and a six-inch-raised bed floor into one clean, restrained build. Commenters praised it specifically for what the builder didn’t touch, no shaved handles, no over-modification. Watch the full walkaround to see how a police cruiser ended up wearing a classic Ford’s clothes.
This 1966 Ford F-100 Shortbed Fleetside cruising around Dallas carries a small fender badge that marks it as one of the earliest trucks built on Ford’s Twin I-Beam front suspension, a design that stayed in production under F-Series pickups for three decades. With a small-block Ford V8 and updated air conditioning, it is set up to be driven, not just admired. Read on to find out why two forged beams beat the solid axle everyone else was still using.
Chevrolet did not just show up at the 2017 Chicago World of Wheels, it took over the floor. A hood-up Nova, rows of Chevelles and Camaros, and a growing fleet of vintage C10 pickups outnumbered nearly everything else in the Rosemont convention center during the show’s 55th year. Why does one brand keep winning a show that welcomes every make and every kind of build? The reasons run from a shared small-block to the Midwest’s long history with GM. Read on to see why the bowtie count runs so high in Chicago.
Chevrolet’s 1972 Nova SS shipped with a single 350-cubic-inch small-block rated at 200 net horsepower — a far cry from whatever combination is making this particular example claim 700 horsepower today. As the last Nova SS built before the muscle car era wound down, it’s become a favorite blank canvas for builders chasing numbers Chevrolet’s engineers never imagined. Read on to find out how a factory economy car became a supercharged monster.
A 1959 Cadillac convertible was already the most outrageous car on American roads, with the largest tailfins ever fitted to a production automobile. This one has been dropped onto an air-bag suspension, given an interior its builder calls a man cave of wheels, and finished in paint deep enough to stop a crowd. Read on to find out what makes the 1959 Series 62 convertible so rare, why Cadillacs dominate the custom cruiser scene, and what a bagged Caddy gives up to look this good.
Ask ten gearheads to define ‘muscle car’ and you’ll get ten different answers — and at least one argument about whether a Mustang counts. The real definition comes down to a specific formula Detroit stumbled into in the mid-1960s: a mid-size body paired with the biggest engine a manufacturer had to offer. From the Pontiac GTO’s accidental invention of the category to a modern restomod chasing genuine ZL1 power, read on to see what actually separates a muscle car from every other fast classic.
Matt Barczak was driving to inspect a rare Hemi Road Runner when his father read a strange trim code off a classified ad from the back seat: what’s an X33 Camaro? That single question sent Matt three and a half hours across Pennsylvania in the middle of a January night — and what waited in the barn wasn’t just one forgotten Trans-Am homologation car. Read on to find out what a documented 1969 Z/28 and a 1970 AAR ‘Cuda were doing under the same dusty roof.
A Plymouth engineered to win NASCAR races before it ever had to satisfy a single customer, this 1970 Road Runner Superbird hides a nineteen-inch nose cone and a factory explanation that wasn’t the real one. At the Volo Auto Museum, director Brian Grams walks through the Alpine White, 440-powered example on camera, tracing the aero-war engineering Plymouth built in genuinely limited numbers before NASCAR changed the rules for good. The scoops, the wing, and the vinyl top all had a job to do.
Chevrolet made a bold claim about its own history: that the 2018 Camaro ZL1 1LE could out-drive the beloved fifth-generation Z/28, a $75,000 track special worshipped for its naturally aspirated 505-hp LS7, and do it for less money. The new car’s supercharged 650-hp LT4 and a Nurburgring time that beats the old benchmark before even adding the priciest option package make the comparison worth a closer look. Read on to see whether the numbers hold up.
Every January, a quiet corner of central Florida turns into the largest gathering of collector cars on Earth — thousands of vehicles, nearly two weeks of bidding, and a sales tally that regularly tops $400 million. Here’s how Mecum’s Kissimmee auction grew from a handful of tents into the event the entire muscle car hobby watches every year, and why it matters even if you never plan to bid.
When Dodge unveiled the Challenger SRT Demon, the rumor mill had been running wild for months, and the real numbers still managed to shock: 840 horsepower, 770 lb-ft, a 9.65-second quarter mile, and a Guinness-certified wheelie. Then came the strange details, like passenger seats priced at $1 each and a car so quick the NHRA effectively banned it in stock form. Read on to find out how Dodge built a showroom drag car that broke the rules on purpose.
No-prep racing strips away the safety net of a perfectly prepped track and dares drivers to make it work anyway, and this chopped-top Chevy Nova wagon is built for exactly that kind of chaos. A 632-cubic-inch big-block and two nitrous kits totaling a 600 shot turn a family hauler into a launch that shakes the grandstands. Swamp Thing and crew took it to No Prep Mayhem in Wichita to race the biggest names in the format. Read on to see why a wagon belongs there.