 |
Most muscle car buyers walk right past the 1970 Pontiac Catalina Sport Wagon, but a well-optioned example could be had with the brand-new 455-cubic-inch V8 in up to 370-horsepower HO tune — genuine big-inch muscle wearing a body built to haul six or nine passengers. Only 113 of the 29,394 wagons built that year came with a manual transmission. Read on to find out why this factory sleeper still flies under the radar.
Dan Mershon has owned eleven Shelby Cobras, and he says the 289 is the one that actually looks right, with no flared rear fenders and none of the bulk that later kit-car replicas chase. The small-block Cobra was a British roadster reborn with Ford power, a car that won an FIA world championship in coupe form and that still weighs less than most modern hatchbacks. Read on to find out why the narrow-body 289 remains the purist’s Cobra.
Chevrolet almost let its meanest 1967 Chevelle engine disappear entirely, pulling it from the order sheet before quietly bringing it back as a dealer-only option nobody advertised. Only 612 cars ever got the L78 396 that model year, each one built in a narrow three-month window and stamped with details collectors still hunt for today. Rated at 375 horsepower and built to run with Ford and Mopar’s best, it turned a mid-size Chevy into a genuine street fighter. Here’s what made this rare Chevelle tick.
A small Wisconsin shop turned heads at SEMA by building classic Mopars with body panels made almost entirely of carbon fiber — hoods, fenders, even fender flares, shaving roughly 600 pounds off cars already packing supercharged Hemi power. SpeedKore’s builds have since gone from show-floor curiosities to Kevin Hart’s personal fleet, a Fast & Furious movie car, and an actual Dodge parts catalog. Here’s how a carbon-fiber gimmick became one of the most respected names in modern muscle car building.
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 428 Police Interceptor, rated at 360 horsepower, before Ford dropped in the underrated 428 Cobra Jet and renamed the car GT500KR, King of the Road. This red-and-white example wears the classic Shelby colors, and which 428 sits under its hood tells you exactly when it was built. Read on to find out how to tell them apart.
The 426 Hemi was not just Plymouth’s biggest engine option in 1970. It was a race-bred monster that won Daytona in its first outing and was promptly banned until Chrysler agreed to sell it to the public. Only 666 ‘Cuda buyers checked that option box in 1970, and just 14 of those cars left the factory as convertibles. Beneath the shaking hood scoop sat 425 rated horsepower and one of the most recognizable exhaust notes ever produced. Read on to find out why it disappeared after only two years.
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 drag racing staples for decades, but no manufacturer had ever put one in a production car until Dodge teased the 2018 Challenger SRT Demon. The system locks the transmission so the car sits motionless at high rpm, then releases everything in an instant for a reaction-time edge reported at around 30 percent. Read on to find out how Dodge made a pit-lane modification survive daily driving, a factory warranty, and a 9.65-second quarter mile.
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.
The 1969-and-a-half Plymouth Road Runner A12 was Plymouth’s answer for buyers who wanted Hemi-level violence without the Hemi-sized invoice: a 440 wearing three two-barrel carburetors, a lift-off fiberglass hood, black steel wheels with no hubcaps, and an advertised 390 horsepower. Built for only part of one model year, it remains one of the rarest and most purposeful factory big-block packages of the muscle car era. Read on to find out how Plymouth built a strip car on a budget.
Most surviving 1979 Trans Ams are black and gold, and this Van Nuys-built car is not. Atlantis Blue was offered for a single model year, and few buyers chose it over the movie-star Special Edition treatment. The result is a subdued, monochromatic second-generation Trans Am that still looks modern today, built during the nameplate’s best-selling year. Read on to find out why the rare color is the least interesting thing about it.
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 had finished their own testing. When the official SAE-certified rating finally landed, it told a different story, one backed by an NHRA-certified quarter-mile instead of forum speculation. Read on for what the real number turned out to be, why the rumor overshot, and why the certified figure ended up being the better story.
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.