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Aston Martin built the DB11 around two things it had never used before: a new aluminum platform and a twin-turbocharged V12, hidden inside one of the most classically shaped grand tourers the brand had made in years. The results were numbers no naturally aspirated Aston V12 had ever hit, including 600 horsepower and a 3.6-second sprint to 60. Here’s how Aston Martin’s biggest technical gamble in decades still ended up feeling completely true to form.
Everybody remembers the SOHC Cammer Comets that terrorized A/FX in 1964, driven by names like Dyno Don Nicholson and Arnie Beswick. Fewer people remember what Bill Stroppe’s shop built the following year to chase down the class just below it, a stripped, small-block Comet that could embarrass cars with a full inch of displacement advantage. Read on to find out how a 289 beat cars it had no business beating.
Most nitrous drag builds start with a Camaro or a Mustang, not a Mercury sedan almost nobody remembers Mercury ever made. This 1979 Zephyr, known on the track as Black Betty, has been quietly running down far more intimidating machinery at Oklahoma’s toughest bracket events. Read on to find out how a small-block-powered compact keeps beating cars that look nothing like it should lose to.
This 2010 Camaro SS runs an LS3 pushed to 840 rear-wheel horsepower through a ProCharger centrifugal supercharger with a nitrous shot stacked on top, numbers that would embarrass most cars leaving a modern dealership floor. What actually separates this build from the dozens of boosted Camaros that grenade on their third pull is what happened to the internals long before the dyno ever spun up. Read on to find out what it took to make that kind of power survive.
Plymouth needed only one year to turn the Barracuda into a genuine big-block predator, and this 1970 440 Six Pack ‘Cuda hardtop carries one of the rarest option combinations the factory ever built. Fewer than two thousand left the factory this way, and an even smaller handful wore the one extra option collectors chase hardest. Read on to find out just how rare this exact combination really is, and what it takes to prove it.
At Cars & Coffee Italy, American muscle cars are the rare exception surrounded by a sea of Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Paganis – sometimes a single Corvette represents the entire US contingent. But Italy’s relationship with American V8 power runs deeper than one car meet suggests, with coachbuilders like De Tomaso and Iso quietly stuffing Ford and Chevy engines into exotic Italian bodies for decades.
Ford built the Shelby GT350’s Voodoo V8 to rev to 8,250 rpm with zero turbochargers anywhere near it. A shop in Martinsville, Indiana had other plans, bolting on twin turbos for staged packages up to 1,400 horsepower. Read on to find out what it takes to nearly triple a purist engine’s output without losing what makes it distinct.
This customized 1960 Chevrolet El Camino rides on the rare full-size Brookwood platform used only during the model’s brief 1959-60 debut run, before Chevrolet discontinued it and later revived it on the smaller Chevelle platform in 1964. Even its own owner isn’t entirely sure what all has been done to it over the years. Read on to find out why this short-lived first generation nearly disappeared for good.
A big-block Fox Body Mustang nicknamed Lucifer is built to swallow a 900-horsepower shot of nitrous, a combination most engines could never survive even once. Cramming a genuine big-block into an engine bay designed around Ford’s compact small-block is its own engineering fight before the nitrous bottle even opens. Read on to find out what a build this aggressive actually demands from its fuel system, driveline, and chassis to survive repeated passes down the strip.
This 1964 Ford Thunderbird convertible sits at the exact hinge point between two eras of the Thunderbird nameplate — the swoopy Bullet Bird was gone, and the boxier, gadget-laden fourth generation had just arrived. It carries a 390 V8, a power-folding top, and a swing-away steering wheel most drivers today have never touched. Read on to find out what made 1964 the year the Thunderbird reinvented itself.
Before “Charger” meant a full-size fastback muscle car, it meant something else entirely: a performance-oriented trim package on Dodge’s compact Dart. This 1965 example carries that original Charger identity, a full year before the nameplate Dodge fans know today even existed. Read on to find out how a badge on a compact car predicted the direction the entire brand was about to take.
For five years the Shelby GT500 nameplate sat dormant while rivals kept shipping ever-more-powerful factory monsters. Then camouflaged prototypes started turning up at Virginia International Raceway wearing a roll cage and a leaked oil spec sheet that hinted at serious horsepower. Read on to find out what those spy photos gave away, and how the finished car compared to the speculation.
Only 475 of the roughly 96,000 Chargers Dodge built for 1968 left the factory with a 426 Hemi under the hood, and this 4-speed example pairs that rare engine with a color so scarce that surviving examples can be counted on one hand. Read on to find out just how thin the numbers get, and why proving a car is truly one of a kind is harder than it sounds.
Brett Chmura’s 1983 Chevy Monte Carlo SS started life as a mild 175-horsepower NASCAR homologation special, built at a moment when Chevrolet desperately needed an aero nose to keep winning on Sunday. Three generations after his grandfather opened the family’s first repair shop in 1959, Brett’s version makes roughly 1,000 horsepower. Read on to find out how a shade-tree family legacy turned a stock body style into something the factory never imagined.
Muscle car or pony car — Car Throttle tries to settle a debate that automotive enthusiasts have been having since the mid-1960s, tracing the difference from the original Pontiac GTO through today’s Hellcats and GT350s. The comment section turns the video into its own argument, complete with a tongue-in-cheek Jeremy Clarkson litmus test and a full lineage of what actually counts as modern muscle. Watch to see where the line really falls — and why almost nobody agrees on it.