 |
Two rival muscle cars, one shared problem — by 1973 the engines that made both of these nameplates famous were already gone or gutted by emissions rules. Dodge’s Challenger walked into the model year with no big block option left at all, while Chevrolet’s Camaro found a quieter way to keep some performance alive. Neither one wins a drag race against its late-’60s ancestor, but both tell the real story of how the muscle car era actually ended.
A garage door left open on a gold Trans Am, and the real story is hiding under the hood, not in the paint. Pontiac buried a genuinely worthwhile performance upgrade on the 1978 option sheet for just seventy-five dollars — one that turned a solid 400 cubic inch V8 into something with real bite. Add in a certain black Trans Am’s star turn at the movies that same year, and you’ve got one of the most underrated performance bargains of the late muscle car era.
The Ferrari 512 BBi traded raw carbureted power for fuel injection and gained something arguably more valuable: real drivability, without giving up a 174 mph top speed. As the final and most refined chapter of the Berlinetta Boxer story, only 1,007 were built before the Testarossa took over in 1984. We look at what changed under that flat-12 and why this ocean-view example represents the end of an era for Ferrari’s mid-engine supercars.
A claimed 3,800 horsepower out of a C6 Corvette sounds absurd until the eighth-mile timeslip backs it up — 3.9 seconds at 193 mph, numbers that belong in Pro Mod company, not a street-legal Corvette. We break down what it actually takes to push a small-block-based platform into four-digit horsepower and why those elapsed times put this build in rarified company.
Chevrolet built the 1958 Impala Sport Coupe body and trim for exactly one model year before moving on, making genuine surviving examples like this Sierra Gold coupe rarer than more famous Bel Airs from neighboring years. Owner Marc Vernon has cared for this one since 2014, keeping the details intact that most 58s lost to hot-rodding or neglect. It is Chevrolet overlooked middle child, sandwiched between two more famous redesigns. Watch to see what a genuine one-year-only Chevy still looks like today.
1979 was the last real fight the muscle car era put up before emissions rules and insurance rates finished it off, and this Firebird Formula — not a Trans Am, no Bandit badge — proves the good engines were still out there if you knew where to look. Pontiac stuffed four different corporate V8/V6 combinations onto one order sheet that year, topped by a W72-tuned 400 limited to just 367 units. Here’s what actually powered the last great Firebirds before the lights went out.
A factory pickup truck beat a Corvette in a straight line in 1978, and it wasn’t a fluke — it was a loophole. Dodge found a gap in EPA regulations that let this little red truck breathe far more freely than any passenger car that year, and the results humiliated some genuinely serious sports cars. Here’s how a two-year-only truck became one of the fastest American vehicles of its era.
Studebaker’s 1950 “bullet nose” design was so unconventional that people joked they couldn’t tell which way the car was facing — and it still sold 343,000 units, an all-time high for the brand. Owner Scott Cawley’s version skips the trailer-queen treatment entirely, running an updated suspension and a swapped-in modern engine so he can drive it daily. Here’s the design gamble that nearly didn’t happen, and the sales run that proved the doubters wrong.
In the GTO’s best sales year, Pontiac built roughly six hardtop coupes for every convertible that rolled off the line — a gap that explains why drop-top GTOs command such a premium today. One body style was built for Saturday night drag strips, the other for Sunday cruising with the top down. Both are wearing the same legendary V8, just wrapped in very different intentions.
This 1964 Corvette Pro Street build does not hide its engine – it lets a supercharged big block rise clear above the roofline for anyone to see. Pro Street builds have always favored theater alongside speed, and a claimed 2,600 horsepower would put this car among the most extreme examples of the genre. Compared to other well-documented Pro Street Corvette builds pushing 1,200 to 1,750 horsepower, this one is aiming considerably higher.
A supercharged 707-horsepower Hemi V8 was never built with snow in mind, which is exactly why watching a Dodge Charger Hellcat fight for traction in a snow-covered parking lot is so much fun. Dodge backs that number with 650 lb-ft of torque and a 3.6-second run to 60 mph — numbers that make winter driving feel like an entirely different kind of stunt. Some cars are built for the drag strip. This one apparently doesn’t take winter off.
This 1966 Mustang GT wears its ‘Stylin’ Stang’ name well, hiding a massaged 289 HiPo small block under otherwise factory-correct sheetmetal. A .030-over bore wakes up the engine Ford once refused to sell without a four-speed, backed by a Top Loader-style gearbox and an 8-inch rear running 3.55 gears. It is proof that a tasteful restomod does not need to shout to get the job done.
Chevrolet’s 1967 Impala SS Convertible could run a 15.8-second quarter-mile thanks to the rare Z24 package’s 427 Turbo-Jet big-block, only fitted to 2,124 Super Sports that year. Here’s what made this full-size convertible a genuine sleeper, and why finding a documented ragtop with the real 427 package is harder than most people assume.
A turbocharged 5.3L under a Z/28 hood sounds like heresy until you remember the original Z/28 never offered an automatic transmission either. This one launches on a manual six-speed with two-step control while most of the drag strip around it runs slushboxes. We trace the Z/28 back to its 1967 Trans-Am homologation roots and explain why a modern turbo build still honors that stick-shift-only bloodline.
A 1970 Dodge Charger R/T in the rare Petty Blue factory color found its stage nearly five thousand miles from Detroit, cruising the streets of Vantaa, Finland. Under the hood sits the 440 cubic inch big-block, and the owner isn’t shy about using it — working in a deliberate powerslide before settling into a room-filling idle. See how American muscle found a following overseas.