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A Buick GSX built during a five-month factory window in 1970 raises a genuine documentation question for its current owners — one that even a close look at the car’s trim and colors can’t fully settle. Its Stage 1 engine option carried an official rating widely considered too conservative for what the car could actually do. Here’s the open question at the center of this particular GSX.
In 1965, Chevrolet offered Corvette buyers a fuel-injected small-block that cost nearly double the price of the brand-new 396 big-block, and made fewer horsepower on paper. Only 771 people took that bet, and the option disappeared entirely the following year, not returning to a Corvette for another seventeen years. Read on to see why buyers paid the premium, and how this particular ’65 Sting Ray proved it decades later at Drag Week 2015.
Restoration shop owner Luciano ‘Lucky’ Lacerda built this 1961 Cadillac Series 62 Convertible specifically to showcase his own shop’s work at SEMA, finishing it in a deep green that stands out even at a packed Scottsdale cars-and-coffee. It’s a deliberate choice in a SEMA field dominated by trucks and muscle cars. Watch to see what a restoration shop owner picks when the whole point is to prove what he can do.
A 1971 Chevy Nova originally left the factory with a base inline-six – this one now runs a 406 cubic-inch small block with a full roller valvetrain and a build claiming 572 horsepower to the wheels. Paired with drag radials instead of slicks, it’s built to be raced and driven home the same day. See why the 406 stroker combination remains one of the most popular small-block builds in drag radial racing, and what it takes to make that kind of power reliably.
Thirty years after Saleen’s race team swept four championships in a single 1987 season, the Championship Commemorative Edition Mustang arrived with a 3.2-liter liquid-cooled supercharger on its 5.0-liter V8, 730 horsepower on the street, 750 in track trim, and a production run capped at just 30 cars starting around $87,000. General Tire came back as a partner and Racecraft suspension returned. Read on to find out what made that season worth honoring.
This Dodge Challenger looks like it just rolled off a dealer lot, right up until it launches. Built to run at Texas Speed Syndicate’s exclusive Quick 30 drag day near Houston, this twin-turbo sleeper makes over 1,300 horsepower and has been recognized as holding the modern Mopar speed record. Twin turbos on a late-model Challenger are rare enough on their own. Read on to see why hiding them under a stock body is the hardest part.
That ‘396’ badge on this 1972 Camaro SS is telling a small lie – Chevrolet quietly bored the engine out to 402 cubic inches back in 1970 and just never bothered updating the fender emblem. Add in a 174-day UAW strike that crushed Camaro production that same year, and this clean Graphite Gray Pro Touring build is sitting on a genuinely rare factory foundation. Only 970 Camaros left the line wearing this exact big-block SS package. Read on to find out why 1972 was the end of the road for the big-block Camaro.
A 1972 Corvette build sheet shows a horsepower number for the LS5 454 that looks like a nosedive next to earlier years, and the reason has more to do with how Detroit measured power than with what the engine actually made. This numbers-matching, Bryar Blue example with a Muncie four-speed and original Rally Wheels sits right at that turning point, and an LS6 cam and intake swap wakes it up further. Read on to find out what really happened to the horsepower wars in 1972.
For its final model year in 1984, Hurst and Oldsmobile built just 3,500 examples of a car with three separate shift levers on its console, giving drivers manual control over an ordinary automatic transmission’s upshifts. It closed out a sixteen-year partnership with a genuinely novel piece of engineering rather than just another cosmetic special edition. Read on to find out how the “Lightning Rods” console actually worked.
In late 2016, spy shots and a leaked mapping image convinced enthusiasts that Ford’s fiercest Mustang nameplate was coming back for 2017. It wasn’t — the real Shelby GT500 didn’t arrive until three years later, and when it did, it packed nearly 100 more horsepower than anyone was rumoring at the time. Here’s what actually happened between the rumor and the reveal, and why the wait ended up worth it.
This 1951 Oldsmobile 98 still runs the original 303 cubic inch Rocket V8 that helped ignite Detroit’s horsepower war, and it still wears its factory interior after all these decades. Surviving this honest is rare for a car this old. Here’s why the Rocket name mattered, and why finding one still original is worth stopping for.
Only 28,800 Mustangs left the factory in 1967 with the S-code 390 big block, out of more than 400,000 built that year, making this Candy Apple Red example a genuine rarity hiding in plain sight. Its one-year-only GTA badge and factory 320-horsepower rating set it apart from the small-block Mustangs most buyers actually chose. Read on to find out why values on these cars have stayed surprisingly reasonable.
This Forest green 1951 Ford F1 half-ton shortbed wears the Five-Star Cab that grew out of Ford’s Million Dollar Cab redesign, and it backs it up with an upgraded 350, power steering, disc brakes, and air conditioning that no 1951 work truck ever offered. Ford built about 117,400 F1 pickups that year, yet very few survive looking this sharp. Read on to find out what Ford’s investment bought truck buyers and how this build finished the job.
Dodge promised the Challenger SRT Demon would be both the fastest and the most advanced muscle car ever built, and the New York auto show debut in April 2017 had to prove it. The 840-horsepower figure handled the fastest part, but it was the technology, from Performance Pages and tire-specific launch control to a factory TransBrake and drag-mode suspension, that made the second claim stick. Read on to find out how Dodge made brute force and sophistication work together.
Pitted, dented stainless trim is one of the first things restorers toss in favor of reproduction pieces, and one of the first things veterans wish they had saved when the repro molding refuses to follow a body line. Original stainless can be brought back to a mirror finish with hammers, dollies, files, a wet-sanding progression from coarse to ultra-fine grit, and careful buffing, but the process rewards patience and punishes shortcuts. This guide walks through each stage and the mistakes that ruin good trim. Read on to find out what saving the original actually takes.