 |
HOT ROD Power Tour 2017 rolled from Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City to Iowa Speedway and the Davenport fairgrounds, and the cars stealing the show belonged to the 1970s: the last high-compression muscle of the early decade and the blower-scooped, white-letter-tired street machines that followed. The decade Detroit almost gave up on turned out to be the crowd favorite. Read on to find out why ’70s survivors and tributes drew the tightest crowds on the tour.
The 2018 Buick Regal GS trades the traditional sedan shape for a Sportback liftback body and adds a twin-clutch rear differential more commonly found on sports coupes. A 310-horsepower V6, Brembo brakes, and a HiPer Strut front suspension round out a genuine engineering commitment rather than a badge-only performance package. Read on to see why Buick is chasing a very different kind of buyer with this one.
Ford built the 1968 F-100 to survive job sites and farms, never imagining it would become one of the most requested platforms in the street truck community decades later. Read on to find out how Ford’s Twin I-Beam suspension changed the ride quality game, and why this generation’s proportions still work with a lowered stance and a built V8.
Chrysler built roughly 738 Hemi Coronets across the entire 1966 lineup, and this one carries a combination rare enough that plenty of lifelong Mopar guys have never seen one in person. Under unassuming sheet metal sits a genuine numbers-matching 426 Street Hemi and four-speed, a pairing that cost the original buyer nearly a thousand dollars and scared off almost everyone else. Read on to find out just how thin that production number really gets.
A Ford engineer’s idea of a headline about comfort turns out to be one of the driving world’s best jokes — this 1964 Fairlane Thunderbolt had its heater, sun visors, and even a windshield wiper removed in the name of speed. Built in tiny numbers purely to dominate NHRA Super Stock, it terrified rivals with a horsepower figure Ford never fully admitted to. Read on to find out what was really hiding under that fiberglass hood, and what a real one costs to own today.
Before Buick ever got its hands on the Riviera’s shape, it was turned down by both Cadillac and Chevrolet, two divisions with far flashier reputations. What Buick built instead became one of GM’s most quietly potent personal luxury cars, eventually packing a 455-cid V8 good for over 500 lb-ft of torque. Read on to find out why the flashier divisions walked away, and how a Buick ended up out-muscling cars it was never supposed to compete with.
This 1978 Dodge D150 Warlock traded work-truck practicality for gold pinstripes, real oak bed rails, and bucket seats, part of Dodge’s factory-customized ‘Adult Toys’ lineup aimed at buyers who wanted a pickup with attitude. Few of these survive in good condition today. Read on to find out what made the Warlock different from every other truck on the lot.
By 1973 the original muscle car war was already over, and this Challenger-versus-Camaro pairing shows exactly how each company handled the retreat. Dodge dropped its six-cylinder but lost every big-block option in the process, while Chevrolet quietly kept a spread of 350 V8s alive. Read on to find out which nameplate blinked first — and why survivors from this unglamorous model year are finally getting collector attention.
A modified C6 Corvette is laying down eighth-mile passes in under four seconds at 193 mph, numbers that belong to professional doorslammer classes rather than a car still wearing a production body. Getting there means a built bottom end, forced induction stacked in ways most street builds never attempt, and a fuel system built to survive numbers most engines can only dream about. Read on to find out what it actually takes — and what it costs — to push a small-block Corvette platform into four-digit horsepower territory.
Marc Vernon’s 1958 Chevrolet Impala Sport Coupe, finished in Sierra Gold and owned since 2014, represents a body style Chevrolet built for exactly one model year before redesigning the Impala entirely. Fans call it the Baby Cadillac for its Cadillac-rivaling chrome and presence. Watch to see why this one-year-only design still stops strangers in their tracks.
1979 was the biggest sales year the Firebird ever had, and the Formula sat in an interesting spot between the budget-focused Esprit and the flashier Trans Am. This example carries the shaker hood and dual exhaust that made Formula buyers feel like they’d gotten the enthusiast’s Firebird without paying Trans Am prices. Read on to find out what made 1979 such a pivotal year for the second-generation Firebird lineup.
The 1978 Dodge Li’l Red Express used a light-truck emissions loophole to squeeze 225 horsepower from a 360-cubic-inch V8 at a time when most passenger cars were far more restricted. The truck’s most famous moment came in a magazine test where it beat a Chevrolet Corvette to 100 miles per hour. Read on for the regulatory quirk and the two-year production run that made this pickup a legend.
Scott Cawley’s 1950 Studebaker still wears the polarizing bullet nose that made strangers ask which direction the car was actually driving, but this one skips the trailer-queen treatment most survivors get. An updated suspension and a modern engine swap keep it as a genuine daily driver, seventy years after Studebaker’s gamble on Raymond Loewy’s design became the best-selling year in company history. Read on to see what made the design so divisive in the first place.
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. Read on to find out how that production gap still shapes values decades later.
A 1964 Corvette with an engine that rises above its own roofline is not built to blend in. This Pro Street build claims 2,600 horsepower from a stacked, blown big-block that turns the car’s hood into an afterthought, putting it in the same conversation as some of the most extreme builds the genre has ever produced. Read on to see where that claim actually stacks up.