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Mal Forys built his custom Dodge Challenger alone, in a home garage, without a professional shop’s budget or a sponsor behind him. Getting it accepted onto the floor at Detroit’s Autorama — one of the biggest hot rod shows in the country — for a second time took years of nights and weekends. Read on to find out what a garage-built show car actually takes to compete with the pros.
This 1969 Chevrolet Camaro Z/28 spent forty years sitting untouched, accumulating dust while the collector market around it exploded. Built from a Trans-Am homologation special that Chevrolet only ever intended for racing, it represents the peak production year of one of the most celebrated small-block muscle cars ever built. Read on to find out what forty years of storage actually does to a car like this.
This widebody 1973 De Tomaso Pantera hides a serious trick under its flared fenders: a Ford GT front end grafted onto an Italian mid-engine body, backed by a 351 Cleveland V8 and a ZF five-speed transaxle. Ford sold the Pantera through Lincoln-Mercury dealers for just a few years before an oil crisis and warranty headaches ended the partnership. Read on to find out what it took to merge two very different Fords into one genuinely double-take build.
Tony has owned this 700-horsepower 1969 AMC Javelin SST for thirty-five years, driving it to the strip, racing it hard, and towing a parts trailer three hundred miles between events. Getting a car this powerful to stand its front wheels up on launch, and land clean every time, takes decades of dialed-in suspension work most owners never attempt. Read on to find out what’s really behind a wheels-up launch like this one.
The Hemi Challenger convertible now ranks among the most valuable classic Mopars ever sold at auction — a strange fate for a car that, by 1970s sales figures, came remarkably close to being called a commercial failure. Discontinued after just five years on the market, the original Challenger’s brief production run quietly built the foundation for its soaring collector value today. Read on to find out what actually went wrong, and why it stopped mattering.
Forty-four years apart, Chevrolet tried to answer the same weird question: what happens when you cross a sports car with a pickup bed? The first answer became a three-decade icon. The second answer looked incredible, packed real horsepower, and still only lasted about three years on the sales floor. Here’s how the El Camino and the SSR actually stack up against each other.
Mercury built the Cougar as a plusher, quieter alternative to the Mustang, and it won Motor Trend Car of the Year honors in 1967 for exactly that reason. Two years later, the Eliminator trim hid a 428 Cobra Jet V8 rated at 335 horsepower under the same badge. Read on to find out how a luxury-focused pony car turned into one of Detroit’s most underappreciated muscle cars.
A 1963 Ford Falcon was never supposed to be a show car — Ford built it to be cheap and forgettable, not fast or beautiful. The build that turned up at the 2017 Detroit Autorama, with a modern 5.0 Coyote V8 under the hood and a stance that reportedly makes nearby Camaros look sad, argues otherwise. Even longtime enthusiasts in the comments admit they never expected to be impressed by a Falcon. Watch to see the build that changed their minds.
This 1970 Chevelle SS wears a period-correct red and black paint job over something Chevrolet never built at the factory, a modern 572-cubic-inch crate engine capable of blowing past the legendary LS6’s numbers. The swap raises a real question about where resto-mod ambition ends and factory-original respect begins. Read on to find out what it actually takes to make a fifty-year-old chassis survive that much power.
Germany isn’t the first place you’d expect to find a gathering of rat rods, Bel Airs, and Hemi-powered Americana, but every May a decommissioned coal mine in Herten turns into exactly that. Kustom Kulture Forever has grown into one of the biggest custom car and hot rod shows on the entire continent. Here’s what makes this only-in-Europe celebration of American steel worth the trip.
This 1973 Monte Carlo cruising through Dallas shows exactly what Chevrolet was really selling that year, a European-inspired ride wrapped in unmistakably American size and comfort. Launched right before the 1973 oil embargo reshaped the entire market, its 350 four-barrel V8 hit a genuine sweet spot between performance and everyday livability. Read on to find out what period reviewers loved most about it.
This gutted and caged Chevrolet C10 showed up to Slow Car Cash Days, a Midwest grudge racing event with an 800-horsepower wheel cap, running a small-block Chevy V8 with a comparatively simple nitrous system, and it wasn’t even turned all the way up. It still ran down dedicated race builds, leaving the crowd, and the comment section, wondering what it could do with no cap at all. Watch the runs and see why square-body owners can’t stop talking about it.
This 1967 Chevrolet Camaro RS convertible wears factory Ermine White over Bright Blue, and the Rally Sport package on the nose says nothing at all about what is under the hood. RS was a roughly $105 appearance option with hidden headlights and revised taillights, nothing more. This one carries a 327 V8, a floor-shifted Powerglide, a power top and a console. Read on to find out why cars ordered this way often survive better than the four-speeds.
Fifty years after breaking Ferrari six-year stranglehold on Le Mans, Ford is putting that victory back on the road with a heritage-liveried GT. This gloss red, red-stitched special edition ties back to one of the greatest underdog wins in racing history. See how Ford turned a decades-old Le Mans triumph into a modern tribute.
Mecum’s Kissimmee auction is famous for volume — acres of muscle cars crossing the block over more than a week. But the real draw for serious collectors is the oddball that shouldn’t exist at all, like a factory-built Pontiac Trans Am wagon GM never intended to sell to the public. Here’s the story behind one of the strangest survivors to ever roll across an auction stage.