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This 1963 Chevrolet Corvette custom, built as the “Split Second,” turned heads the moment it came off the trailer at the 2017 Detroit Autorama — before anyone had even seen what was under the hood. The stance, the color, and the wheel choice all landed perfectly, but it’s the stack-injected 327 and custom flush-mounted glass that turned a good-looking car into a serious build. ScottieDTV caught it on the show floor. Watch to see what made this one impossible to walk past.
In 1987, a hand-built car with no factory badge beat Ferrari, Porsche, and Lamborghini to become the fastest production car in the world. Built in a small German garage by tuner Alois Ruf, the twin-turbo Ruf CTR reached 211 mph and earned the nickname ‘Yellowbird’ after a hair-raising magazine test made it an instant icon. Its record didn’t last forever, but the story behind the car that beat the giants at their own game is one most muscle car fans have never heard in full.
A British Columbia collector spent forty years quietly amassing more than 340 vintage and muscle cars across five acres of land, from a screen-used DeLorean to a rare 1966 Pontiac Beaumont SD. Now ready to let it all go, the owner will only sell it as one package deal, house and restoration shop included, for roughly Can$1.45 million, leaving one big question: who has the space, and the nerve, to take it all on at once?
Project Deep South is a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air riding on an LS3, black chrome trim, and a candy apple paintjob, but the original car came with a 140-horsepower inline-six as standard equipment. That gap between stock and swapped is exactly why the ’57 became a favorite drag strip and hot rod platform starting in the 1960s, thanks to an engine bay big enough for GM’s biggest blocks. This build is just the latest chapter in a six-decade tradition.
Three second-generation Camaros, two build philosophies: manicured Pro Touring precision versus raised, tire-smoking Pro Street menace. The split says something about where builder taste has landed on a body style that Chevy first drew as a European GT-inspired F-body in 1970, then watched lose two-thirds of its horsepower to emissions rules by the late ’70s. That power drought is exactly why so many second-gen Camaros wear modern engines today instead of their original small-blocks.
This 1965 Mercury Comet wears the sponsor decals and drag-strip stance of a car built to race — and it’s channeling a genuinely wild piece of history. Fifty factory Comet Cyclones once terrorized NHRA’s A/FX class with dual-quad 427s under the hood, arguably helping invent the Funny Car along the way.
The Ringbrothers’ G-Code Camaro pairs a 416-cubic-inch, Whipple-supercharged small-block making close to 1,000 horsepower with a hand-laid carbon fiber hood and a chassis built to handle it. Nothing on this 1969 build was left stock — from the Detroit Speed suspension to the custom-forged 20-inch rear wheels, every piece was chosen to work together, not just look good.
Michelle Bongiovanni’s Penn State classmates don’t believe her when she says she races an 8-second car — mostly because the car in question, a factory-built Cobra Jet Mustang, isn’t something you can drive off a dealership lot. Ford builds it strictly for the drag strip, skipping the street-legal equipment entirely in favor of raw quarter-mile performance.
A brand-new 2014 Corvette Stingray with 76 miles on the clock was stripped down and rebuilt around a twin-turbo 548 HEMI making 3,500 horsepower — a number that did not even stay the final figure. Built to run in the Pro Mod class against turbocharged Mustangs, this C7 kept only its roof and rear bodywork from the factory car.
A Dodge Challenger Hellcat brings more horsepower to the table than a Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 — on paper, that should settle a drag race before it starts. But raw power is not the whole story once weight, gearing, and chassis balance get involved. The real gap between these two muscle car rivals comes down to numbers most spec sheets do not headline.
Held every May on the Indiana State Fairgrounds the week before the Indy 500, Dana Mecum’s Original Spring Classic has grown into one of the largest muscle car auctions in the country. Its 30th anniversary sale set a then-record $55.6 million across 1,208 cars sold, headlined by a $1.45 million Porsche and a Vault Find Corvette that drew a moment of silence for its late owner. Less than a decade later, the same event was moving over three times that much money.
A 1969 Chevelle with a twin-turbocharged 540-cubic-inch big-block sounds less like a classic muscle car and more like a jet on a runway. Instead of chasing horsepower with nitrous or a supercharger, this build relies on two turbochargers feeding a stroked, forged-internals big-block — a combination capable of mid-8-second quarter miles while staying streetable.
Alloway’s Hot Rod Shop took a 1955 Plymouth Savoy and did something unusual for a resto-mod: they held back. The body stayed close to stock, the changes are subtle, and the biggest transformation is hiding under the hood, where the shop installed an all-polished aluminum HEMI over 500 cubic inches that they say is one of only two in existence. Add an Art Morrison chassis, shop-exclusive billet wheels, and a Steve Holcomb interior, and you get a Mopar that looks quiet and runs anything but.