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Gabriel Henaut’s 1973 Chevrolet Camaro started its second life the way most great car stories do — by accident, in a California desert, after a wrong turn nearly left him stranded. What he found under a tarp in a stranger’s shed turned into a project that now calls the French countryside home. Petrolicious follows the full story, from a mechanic father’s early lessons to a chance meeting with a man named Roberto. Watch to see how a Detroit V8 ended up thriving an ocean away from home.
Mike Cosculluela was a paperboy in rural Ohio when a black Nova on Cragar S/S wheels rewired how he saw cars forever. More than forty years later, MotorTrend tracked down the Nova he eventually built in response to that memory. It’s one of the clearest examples of a single teenage encounter turning into a lifelong obsession.
The 2014 Chevrolet Camaro Z/28 wasn’t built to win a drag race. Chevy stripped weight, ditched the automatic, and dropped in a 505 horsepower LS7 with one goal in mind: lap times. Reviving a badge born on the Trans-Am circuit in 1967, this Camaro turned a Nurburgring lap quicker than its own supercharged ZL1 sibling despite giving up serious horsepower. It’s proof that raw power was never really the point.
Chevrolet stopped offering big-block power in the El Camino years before 1980, which makes a 454-powered Pro Street build like this one a pure garage creation rather than anything the factory ever built. The wide rear tires and aggressive stance aren’t just for looks – they’re there because a genuine big-block demands a chassis that can put that power down. Here’s what it actually takes to make this kind of swap work.
Barely 17,000 miles and a single careful owner for most of its life, this 1966 Chevrolet Nova SS is the rare survivor that never got beat on. Only about 21,000 Nova SS models were built that year, and this one has spent its whole life being babied instead of raced. See why genuine, unmolested SS Novas like this one are becoming nearly impossible to find.
Everybody remembers the ’69 Firebird hardtop, but Pontiac only built 11,649 convertibles that year – and fewer still carried the 400 cubic inch V8 under the hood. With up to 345 horsepower on tap in Ram Air IV trim, this drop-top combination delivered real muscle car performance without giving up open-air driving. Here’s what makes this rare pairing worth a second look at any show.
This isn’t your grandfather’s ’69 Camaro convertible – a push-button ignition and an aggressive exhaust note hint at a much deeper transformation underneath. Pro-touring convertible builds face a tougher engineering challenge than their hardtop siblings, since losing the roof means losing chassis rigidity that has to be rebuilt from scratch. Here’s what separates a serious pro-touring drop-top from a simple restomod.
This ’78 Trans Am restoration is almost finished, and the details worth knowing go beyond the Bandit-era looks. By 1978, Pontiac’s legendary 455 big-block had been gone for two years, replaced by the 220-horsepower W72 400 – a far cry from the muscle car glory days, but paired with WS6 handling that made it one of the best-driving American cars of its era. It became a legend through image as much as horsepower. A survivor this complete is worth a closer look.
Earl spent his entire working life saving for a Lamborghini Miura, then let it sit untouched in his garage for fifteen years. When a fellow enthusiast named Jeff finally tracked him down, what he found behind that door turned into a $2.5 million discovery and one of 1320Video’s rare departures from street racing. Few barn finds come this original — or this valuable.
Chevrolet built the 1966 Corvette’s 427 big-block for one reason: Shelby’s Cobra was embarrassing American racing, and something had to answer it. Only 5,258 of the 27,720 Corvettes built that year came with the range-topping L72 427/425, a solid-lifter monster that could reportedly outrun its own factory horsepower rating. That scarcity is why numbers-matching L72 cars still command serious money at auction. Few options ever turned a sports car into a legend this fast.
Behind the muscle cars rolling through the South East Moparty Picnic is a Hollywood footnote almost nobody knows — the 1971 Hemi ‘Cuda convertible Don Johnson drove in Nash Bridges wasn’t really a ’71 at all, because Plymouth only ever built eleven of the real thing. Here’s how three modified 1970 convertibles became one of TV’s most famous muscle cars, and why Mopar loyalists still argue about it today.
This 2016 Camaro SS at SEMA 2016 isn’t a show car in the usual sense — it’s the actual test mule Lingenfelter Performance Engineering used to develop its Magnuson supercharger kit for GM’s LT1 engine, now making 630 horsepower and 600 lb-ft. The wheels and exhaust are the only real style upgrades; everything else is pure engineering. Watch to see what a car built to be felt, not photographed, is really about.
This Gen V Dodge Viper wears a twin-turbo setup the factory never built, stacking boost on top of an 8.4-liter V10 that already made up to 645 horsepower stock. Dodge built only 2,427 fifth-generation Vipers before regulations and slow sales ended the model in 2017. What does it take to turn America’s last naturally aspirated supercar into a forced-induction street monster? This build has the answer.
No year, no trim, just an orange Barracuda lighting up its rear tires in a parking lot — and that’s enough to send any Mopar fan down a rabbit hole. Plymouth built the Barracuda for just eleven years, peaking with a legendary 1970 lineup that included a 340 six-pack special built purely to go racing. Here’s what made that short run so wild, and why it ended almost as fast as it began.
