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This Tahoe Turquoise 1966 Ford Mustang convertible carries the 76B Pony interior package, a 225-horsepower 289 four-barrel, factory wire hubcaps, and a power top — nearly every option a 1966 convertible buyer could check. Ford sold over 72,000 Mustang convertibles that year, more than double its nearest rival. Read on to find out exactly what made the Pony interior worth the extra money.
Barn-find hunter Ryan Brutt tracked down a Midwest barn holding several of the rarest cars in muscle car history — a Plymouth Superbird, Dodge Charger Daytona, Charger 500, Ford Torino Talladega, and Mercury Cyclone, all products of NASCAR’s brief and furious late-1960s aero wars. Most haven’t moved in decades. See exactly what’s sitting behind that barn door.
Built by Griffey’s Hot Rods and Restorations, the 1950 Cadillac Series 62 street rod known as LOTACAD lays low to the ground, wears chrome on chrome, carries a full custom interior by Steve Holcomb of Pro Auto Custom Interiors, and hides a modern 6.2-liter V8 making a little over 500 horsepower where Cadillac’s original 331 once lived. It can be naughty or nice, as its builders put it. Read on to see how far this build pushed past Cadillac’s 1950 engineering.
A stock-looking late-model Mustang that pushes 1,420 horsepower and still gets driven on coffee runs sounds like a tall tale, but this Hellion Turbo build makes it real. Driven by the company owner’s wife, it runs sub-nine-second quarter miles while staying fully streetable, with no trailer required. Read on to see how a twin-turbo system can hide that much power in plain sight, and why the streetable half of the equation is the hard part.
Mike O’Toole almost sent this 1966 Ford Mustang hardtop to the junkyard, convinced it was too far gone to save. Instead he restored it, and the Tahoe Turquoise coupe now represents one of the biggest production stories in American automotive history: the model year Ford built more than 607,000 Mustangs and rolled out its millionth example. Read on to find out how close this car came to disappearing and why the ’66 hardtop matters.
This award-winning 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air wears a custom Blue Heaven paint job, but the real story is under the hood. Chevrolet’s rare Rochester Ramjet fuel-injected 283 made 283 horsepower in 1957 — good for one horsepower per cubic inch — and only about 1,530 Bel Airs left the factory with it. That same engine got a Chevy sedan banned from NASCAR that year. Whatever’s powering this custom, it’s chasing a one-year-only legend.
A chance encounter with a brand-new Oxford White 2014 Mustang GT while cruising in a 1987 5.0 turned into an unexpected lesson in just how far Ford’s small-block had evolved. The Fox-body’s 225-horsepower pushrod V8 and the Coyote’s 420-horsepower DOHC screamer share a name and a displacement, but almost nothing else under the surface. What one owner discovered comparing them side by side says a lot about a quarter-century of Mustang engineering, and about the friendships that get built around cars like these.
1976 was the last year Pontiac dared to build a real big-block muscle car, and this Trans Am is a rare survivor of that final stand. Backed by the numbers-matching 455 V8 and a genuine four-speed manual, it’s the kind of drivetrain combination most buyers skipped in favor of the easier automatic. Add in an untouched original interior and you’ve got a driver-quality time capsule from the twilight of an era.
This sunflower yellow 1970 Chevy Yenko Deuce Nova earned the nickname ‘mini muscle car’ from the crew at V8TV’s Muscle Car Of The Week — and it’s not even the first one they’ve featured. Built around a tuned 350 small block rather than Don Yenko’s famous 427 big-block conversions, it offered a lighter, quicker alternative during the muscle car era.
Chevrolet fitted the Corvette with a full chrome bumper for the very last time in 1972, right before federal rules changed the car’s face forever. Buried within that model year’s production numbers sit two remarkably rare configurations that few collectors ever get to see side by side. Discover why only a handful of buyers ever combined the track-focused LT1 engine with factory air conditioning.
A single SCCA rule change in 1970 forced Chevrolet to swap the Z/28’s small homologation-special engine for the Corvette’s LT1 350, reshaping one of the most respected nameplates in muscle car history. A delayed February launch compressed the entire selling season and left Chevrolet with just 8,733 units built that year. Read on to find out why this specific model year still matters to collectors.
The Mercury Cougar spent its first two years cultivating a reputation as the polished, upscale alternative to the Mustang — until the Eliminator package arrived in 1969 and deliberately wrecked that image. With engines ranging up to the 428 Cobra Jet and genuine Trans-Am racing pedigree, it proved the Cougar could fight. Read on to find out why this short-lived package remains one of the era’s most overlooked performance packages.
The SRT Demon captured headlines with 840 horsepower and a waiting list that filled overnight, but Dodge had quietly been selling something nearly as ferocious for years before the Demon ever existed. The Challenger SRT Hellcat skips the race fuel, the stripped interior, and the six-figure markups while still delivering 707 horsepower you can drive to work. Read on to find out why buyers chasing supercharged Hemi drama might already have the better deal.
Lowrider culture was born on the boulevards of East Los Angeles, built by car clubs who turned full-size sedans into rolling art with hydraulics and candy paint decades before the rest of the country noticed. So how did a chromed-out Oldsmobile 98 end up cruising a street in Brooklyn instead? Read on to find out how a West Coast movement built its own history on the opposite coast.
Pontiac never built a 428-cubic-inch Firebird, which makes this 1967 convertible’s engine bay a genuine puzzle until you realize the builder stayed entirely within Pontiac’s own performance parts family. Backed by a four-speed manual and topped with Edelbrock aluminum heads, this is a big-inch build with a cleaner pedigree than most cross-brand engine swaps. Read on to find out where that 428 actually came from.