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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.
A single red convertible on a showroom floor kicked off one of Detroit’s fiercest rivalries — and the car everyone assumes won wasn’t the one that actually won in 1955. Ford’s Thunderbird and Chevy’s Corvette arrived within a year of each other, aimed at the same buyer, but built on opposite ideas of what a “sports car” should be. One offered two-seat purity; the other offered a V8, power windows, and comfort. The sales gap between them that year still stuns people who assume the Corvette always ruled.
Chevy built the 1972 Nova during the leanest years of the muscle car era, when the hottest factory SS you could get made a modest 200 horsepower. This one ignores that history entirely, packing a 408 cubic inch small-block under a stunning orange metallic shell, more than double the output of anything Chevrolet offered in a ’72 Nova. It’s a textbook Pro Touring build: vintage Nova looks with a powertrain the factory never dreamed of. Read on to find out why 408 inches and a ’72 body make such a perfect pairing.
Everyone assumes Pontiac invented the mid-size muscle car formula and the rest of Detroit just copied the homework — except Buick found a clever way around GM’s own displacement rules and almost nobody gives the brand credit for it. The result, culminating in the 1970 GSX and a quarter-mile time Motor Trend called the fastest they’d ever tested, remains one of the most underrated muscle cars of the entire era. Read on to find out which loophole Buick exploited first.
A fan rendering imagines the Shelby GT350R wearing police livery, and the fantasy holds up better than most once you look at the real car underneath. The GT350R’s 5.2-liter Voodoo V8 revs to 8,250 rpm and makes 526 horsepower, the highest-revving naturally aspirated V8 any American automaker has built. Read on for why the powerband suits pursuit duty, why Mustangs have worn the badge before, and why this one would still never survive a fleet manager’s review.
Only about three percent of 1965 Ford Mustangs were ordered with a front bench seat, and this Texas Hill Country convertible is one of them. With a 289 two-barrel V8 and a Cruise-O-Matic automatic, it was built for easy cruising rather than stoplight battles, and its rare interior makes it more interesting than most early Mustangs with far more horsepower. Read on to find out what made buyers skip the option almost everyone else wanted.
When Dennis Ermi bought this 1968 Plymouth Road Runner in 2009, it needed serious paint and engine work before it earned the nickname “Old Runner.” Today it runs a supercharged 472 cubic-inch engine producing roughly 1,000 horsepower under a pearlescent orange-and-black finish. One commenter recognized himself standing next to it in the video and left a promise instead of a caption: “till death do us part.”
This 1967 Chevrolet Corvette wears a factory-correct Goodwood Green paint job, an original tank sticker, and over $150,000 in nut-and-bolt restoration work — but the drivetrain underneath sparked an immediate argument in the comments about whether it even counts as the engine everyone assumes it is. Built to satisfy both a concours judge and a cross-country road trip, this LS7-powered Corvette is chasing two very different goals at once. Watch to see how it pulls off both.
This ’67 Camaro is running a 454 big block Chevy never actually put in a first-gen car from the factory – the real number was a 396, and the 454 didn’t arrive until 1970, reserved for Chevelles and Corvettes. So how’d it end up here, supercharged and ready to embarrass cars three decades newer? Turns out builders have been chasing this exact combination for decades, and the reason why says everything about what muscle car fans really want.