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The Hellcat gets all the attention in Challenger quarter-mile conversations, but the quickest Challengers running the street right now are not wearing a supercharger badge at all. Owner Todd Barber’s twin-turbo R/T runs mid-8-second quarter miles while remaining fully street legal, tagged, and insured. Read on to find out what’s hiding under a hood that looks completely stock.
This all-black Ford Mustang Shelby Super Snake hides an 850-horsepower Kenne Bell-supercharged V8 under its blacked-out sheet metal, backed by a Wilwood brake package built to match. Only around 500 were built for the model year, making this one a rare sight outside a dedicated Shelby event. Read on to find out what it took to get there.
Genuine 427 Cobras are among the rarest and most valuable American performance cars ever built, and “the real deal” is not a phrase serious Cobra people use lightly. This 1965 example carries the side-oiler 427 that turned a British roadster into one of the most feared machines on any road or track. Read on to find out what separates a true 427 Cobra from the thousands of replicas built in its image.
Chevrolet has never handed out the ZL1 badge lightly. Fifty years after 69 all-aluminum COPO Camaros wore it first, the name returned on a 650-horsepower supercharged monster that hits 198 mph and borrows launch control straight from the Corvette Z06. Read on to see what earns a Camaro the right to wear that name.
The 1972 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme wore formal, upscale styling that set it apart from its sportier Cutlass S sibling — but buried in the options list was a Rocket 350 V8 available in three distinct outputs, and the difference between them mattered more than most buyers realized. Read on to find out which combination has become a quiet collector favorite.
A custom shop barely a year and a half old rolled four vehicles onto the SEMA 2016 floor, including a Plymouth ‘Cuda wearing a full carbon-fiber body built from parts customers could actually buy. That wasn’t the only rule getting rewritten that year — Dodge introduced the first all-wheel-drive American muscle car, and one shop found a way to add twin turbochargers on top of an already-supercharged Hellcat engine. Read on to find out how far builders were willing to push the muscle car formula.
The April 2017 issue of Muscle Car Review, with a 1970 Ford Torino GT on the cover, asked three respected restorers, Bob Perkins, Jason White, and Ken Maisano of MASCAR Classics, how to hire a painter and keep a project out of paint shop purgatory. Their advice covers vetting a shop, getting timelines in writing, sorting parts before the car arrives, and what owners owe the shop in return. Read on to find out how the finishers work.
This 1970 Boss 302 Mustang wears Candy Apple Red paint, a factory shaker hood scoop, and the Decor interior package, but its owner has upgraded it with a Tremec TKO five-speed to make it genuinely freeway-capable. Add in factory tach dash, rim-blow steering wheel, and a period-correct underdash AC system, and this becomes a Boss 302 built to be driven, not trailered. Watch to see how a fifty-plus-year-old race homologation special handles modern Southern California traffic.
This 1966 Chevy II Nova left the factory rated for a fraction of the horsepower it claims today, after a build that replaced nearly everything Chevrolet originally installed. Getting to over 870 horsepower required a completely different engine, a reinforced chassis, and drivetrain components built to survive power levels the factory unibody was never designed to handle. Read on for what it actually takes to get a compact 1960s Chevy into that territory.
Chevrolet’s brand-new Camaro needed a real performance engine to compete with the Mustang in 1967, and the answer was a small block nobody had seen in a showroom before: the Turbo-Fire 350. Read on to find out why this debut engine mattered so much, and how it set the stage for everything the Camaro nameplate became.
Two guys running a small restoration shop in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho spent years hunting down original parts for a Mustang most people would have finished with reproductions. The payoff: a numbers-matching 1970 Mach 1 in Grabber Orange with a 428 Cobra Jet under its shaker hood, sold for ninety-nine thousand dollars at Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale. Owner Jack Scanlon has had the car since 2010. What convinced two restorers a thousand miles from the usual parts networks that this build was worth doing right?
The term “pony car” has nothing to do with horsepower, it describes a specific formula the 1964½ Ford Mustang invented and every Detroit rival scrambled to copy. Fifty years later, the Mustang’s 2015 redesign broke from that formula for the first time, adding independent rear suspension and a turbocharged four-cylinder. Read on to find out what actually separates a pony car from a muscle car.
Ford built more than 607,000 Mustangs in 1966, and almost none of them looked any different from this one — until you popped the hood. Order the K-code option and you got a 271-horsepower, solid-lifter 289 hiding under ordinary sheet metal, an engine so under-the-radar that fewer than 5,500 buyers ever checked that box. Read on to find out how to spot a genuine K-code and why collectors chase it so hard today.
Plymouth built just eleven 1971 Barracuda convertibles with the 426 Hemi engine, and only seven of them went to U.S. buyers new. That scarcity has pushed sale prices as high as $3.5 million at auction, with a different example chasing a $4.8 million bid in 2021. Read on to find out what separates a seven-figure Hemi ‘Cuda from an ordinary E-body.
Ford grew the Mustang for 1971 specifically to fit a 429 big-block, but this particular convertible — a military heritage tribute built by Impatient Creations — fills that extra room with a modern supercharged 4.6-liter V8 instead. A full 2006 Shelby Mustang interior and custom airbrush work replace the period-correct big-block approach entirely, turning the car into a deeply personal build rather than a numbers-matching restoration. Read on to find out how the so-called ‘big Mustang’ era became such a capable canvas for a tribute like this one.