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Chevrolet marked the Camaro’s fiftieth birthday in 2017 with a commemorative edition available three completely different ways: a 275-horsepower turbocharged four, a 335-horsepower V6, or the 455-horsepower LT1 V8, all wearing the same Nightfall Gray paint and orange stripes. It was a styling package rather than a performance one, which raises a fair question about what a fiftieth anniversary should actually celebrate. Read on for what the package included and what these cars are worth now.
John Cena’s 1966 Dodge Hemi Charger is not just famous because he owns it. Dodge built only 468 Chargers with the 426 Hemi that first year, making it one of the rarest first-generation Chargers in existence. Cena has kept it unmodified, running its factory 425-horsepower specification more than half a century later. His collection also reveals a pattern common among WWE stars: a preference for loud, powerful American iron over European exotics. It’s a collecting style that mirrors the persona built in the ring.
Boosted Bertha is a 1965 Chevrolet C10 wearing a supercharger and a stance that puts the rocker panels within an inch of the pavement, but the reason a build like this works starts with a decision Chevrolet made back in 1963. Underneath the boost sits a coil-sprung chassis that was already better than anything else in the segment, plus a small-block architecture that takes to forced induction easily. Read on for what Chevy actually sold in 1965 and what these trucks bring now.
A recent horsepower-per-dollar ranking crowned the Chevrolet Camaro the best value on sale, fitting, since the ranking landed during the models final production year. From the 455-horsepower Camaro to unexpected contenders like the Tesla Model 3 Performance, here is where cheap horsepower lives now, and how it compares to the muscle car bargains collectors still chase today.
Facing Dodge’s aerodynamic Chargers in 1969, Ford stretched the Torino’s nose roughly six inches, cut down a rear bumper to serve as a front air dam, and rolled the rocker panels to sneak the car closer to the ground. Then it built about 754 of them for the public with a bench seat, a black hood, and three colors. Here is what the Talladega changed, why the street cars and race cars used different engines, and why it is still underpriced.
On Saturday, June 17, the Goodguys Rod and Custom Association brings its third annual Day in the Hay to Lincoln, Nebraska’s North Haymarket district with Speedway Motors, expecting more than 1,000 hot rods, customs, and muscle cars built through 1972 if last year is any guide. The organization behind it began with about 650 cars in a Pleasanton, California fairground in 1983 and now stages 15 national shows for more than 70,000 members. Read on for how a single parking-lot show grew into a downtown Lincoln institution.
This 1969 Shelby GT500 crossed the block at Auctions America’s Fall Collector Car Weekend in Auburn, Indiana, as a genuinely all-original example — factory paint, an untouched interior, and a Cobra Jet V8 that’s never been pulled for a rebuild. Cars this honest rarely surface at auction anymore, and this one raises the age-old restore-or-preserve question. Watch to see what nearly fifty years of originality actually looks like.
Lucy is a 1968 Chevrolet Camaro with a big block under the hood and an empty plate in the dash where the radio should be, and that combination says everything about how she was originally ordered. 1968 was the year Chevrolet finally filled the gap in its 396 lineup, cured the wheel hop that plagued the first-year cars, and sold 235,147 Camaros in the process. Read on for what separates a genuine big-block car from one wearing the badges.
Jay Lenos Burbank garage holds an estimated 180 cars and 160 motorcycles, but a handful of American muscle cars keep coming up whenever he talks about the ones he loves most. A 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T and a 1969 Camaro Z28 sit alongside oddballs like the front-wheel-drive 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado. Here is what his favorites say about what makes a muscle car worth keeping.
Pontiac spent 1968 quietly fixing the Firebird’s first-year problems, dropping the vent windows for Astro Ventilation, replacing single-leaf rear springs with multi-leaf units, and adding staggered shocks. The new 350, which actually displaced 354 cubic inches, came as a 265-horsepower two-barrel or a 320-horsepower HO. Pontiac built 107,112 Firebirds that year. This one still wears its factory engine and interior. Read on for what originality really requires.
Randy Smalley has owned his white-and-blue 2005 Ford GT since it was new, a Le Mans-inspired supercar he still drives through the Phoenix suburbs rather than storing away. Viewers have called its value trajectory ‘appreciating faster than it could even drive,’ a fitting line for a car built to answer Ford’s own GT40 legacy. Nearly twenty years later, the debate over whether the original supercharged V8 beats the modern turbocharged GT is still going strong. See what makes this one worth the ride.
Plymouth built 2,724 AAR ‘Cudas inside a five-week window in spring 1970, purely to homologate the Trans-Am cars Dan Gurney’s team was campaigning. Each got a 340 Six Barrel with three Holley two-barrels, a functional fiberglass hood, side-exit exhaust ahead of the rear wheels, and staggered tire sizes that were an American production first. This one wears the high-impact Moulin Rouge paint. Read on for why it only lasted one year.
Chevrolet built 21,801 Corvettes for 1971 and only 1,949 carried the LT-1 small block, split 1,306 coupes and 643 convertibles. New low-lead fuel rules cut its compression to 9.0:1 and its rating from 370 to 330 horsepower, yet it still ran to sixty in about six seconds. It could not be ordered with an automatic or air conditioning, and just eight cars got the ZR1 package. Read on for why it stayed special.
The 2018 Dodge Demon made 840 horsepower on race fuel, ran a certified 9.65-second quarter mile, and lifted its front wheels 2.92 feet off the ground, a Guinness-certified first for a production car. Dodge had Nitto build it a street-legal drag radial, rerouted the air conditioning to chill the supercharger, and deleted the passenger seat, selling it back for a dollar. Only 3,300 were built. Read on for what went into it.
A Fox-body Mustang never made more than 235 horsepower from the factory, and that was the 1993 SVT Cobra R. This teal example runs a forged 5.3-liter LS with twin 76-millimeter turbos making roughly 1400, after starting life with a single-turbo 6.0 combination. Getting there took a fuel system, a chassis, and a cage that cost more than the engine. Read on for what a build like this actually requires.