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Read the phrase 1966 Corvette with a 454 big-block and any Corvette historian is going to stop and reread it, because Chevrolet did not build a 454 until 1970. That does not make the car uninteresting; it makes it a different story than the badge suggests. The real 1966 big-block news was a brand-new 427, and the numbers behind it are worth the detour. Read on to find out what was actually available.
Dodge and the Fast and Furious franchise have been tied together since Dominic Toretto first tore the wheels off his father’s 1970 Charger. By The Fate of the Furious, that relationship had grown into a full co-branded campaign called Muscle Heaven, built around a fleet of silver-and-black Challenger SRT Demons. The timing was not accidental. Read on to find out what Dodge was actually proving with it.
This feature follows a two-year-long 1967 Chevy C10 build, inching toward completion while its owner watched his girlfriend’s 1941 Willys pickup rack up show trophies. The C10’s blend of clean 1967-72 styling and modern LS-engine power has made it one of the most popular restomod platforms on the market. The question of just how powerful this particular truck turned out to be remains part of its appeal.
Jay Leno almost passed on his now-famous McLaren F1 twice, calling the roughly $800,000 asking price ‘crazy’ before coming back two weeks later and buying it anyway. That car is worth north of $20 million today, and Leno has turned down offers to sell it — proof, he says, that buying a classic because you love it beats buying one purely as an investment. It’s advice that applies whether you’re shopping for a hypercar or a muscle car.
Chrysler built so few Hemi powered E-body convertibles that commonly cited production figures put the entire two-year total at roughly two dozen cars worldwide. Bob Ashton spent nearly a full year on the phone with Mopar collectors trying to get 27 of them into one room at the Muscle Car And Corvette Nationals in Rosemont, Illinois. Read on for why that gathering may never be repeated, and what makes these particular cars so nearly impossible to assemble.
The Streetkhana autocross has become a fixture of the NSRA Street Rod Nationals, turning a corner of the Kentucky Exposition Center into a timed slalom course for hot rods built decades before autocross existed. Introduced in 2016, the format tests driver skill with hairpins, switchbacks, and speed-gathering straights, awarding fastest pre-1949 and post-1949 cars. What began as an experiment has become an annual tradition.
Most 1966 Dodge Chargers were handsome fastbacks with mild V8s, four bucket seats, and hidden headlights. But one option box cost roughly 880 dollars, close to a third of the car’s base price, and only 468 buyers out of some 37,300 ever checked it. Here is what the 426 Street Hemi brought with it, why the automatic cars may be the sleeper story, and why documentation matters more than condition on these.
When Mikey V’s father, a former American Motors employee, asked his son to choose between a Hornet and a Javelin, the answer became this 1972 AMC Javelin SST, now built to make an estimated 900 horsepower and still driven as a daily commuter whenever weather allows. At Wisconsin’s World of Wheels show, viewers praised the build for keeping genuine AMC power instead of a common big-block swap. See how a father’s question turned into one of AMC’s wildest daily drivers.
The 1969 Pontiac GTO Judge took its name from a television catchphrase and was originally conceived as a cheaper GTO to fight the Road Runner. What Pontiac actually released was the loudest car in its showroom: exclusive paint, bold striping, a rear spoiler nobody could miss, and Ram Air power. Only 6,833 were built that first year. Read on to find out what it takes to push a car like that even further.
A 1969 Chevelle SS 396 and a 1987 Buick GNX are separated by eighteen years and two completely opposed ideas about how to build a fast car. One answers with cubic inches and a big-block soundtrack. The other answers with a turbocharged V6 that beat a Corvette to 60 mph and was almost certainly underrated from the factory. Here is why collectors keep arguing about which one actually wins.
Nobody could order a plain GT350 off a Ford dealer’s Mustang order sheet in 1969, because that badge belonged to Carroll Shelby’s operation and meant the car had been pulled out of the normal build process for serious modification. It also meant something else that year: this was the end. The 1969 cars were the last genuine Shelby Mustangs built new. Read on to find out what was actually bolted underneath the paint.
Only 17 Pontiac GTO Judge convertibles were built for the 1971 model year, and this white example, from The Brothers Collection, is one of them. A commenter details a sister car restored in Oregon with a 455, four-speed, and Super Duty upgrades. Others argue over which cars carried the rare Ram Air IV engine. Watch the full episode to see the wing and stripes that give it away.
This 1962 Chrysler New Yorker wears a 440 V8 that Chrysler hadn’t even invented yet when the car was built. Under an orange-and-purple flake paintjob sits air suspension, a locking differential, and side pipes loud enough to turn heads before the paint does. Read on to find out what the New Yorker actually left the factory with, and why a builder would swap it for an engine four years its junior.
The 1971 Corvette LT-1 lost forty horsepower on paper compared with the 1970 car, and it is the better buy because of it. Chevrolet dropped compression from 11.0:1 to 9.0:1 that year to meet a corporate low-lead fuel mandate, which is exactly why this is the last solid-lifter small block Corvette you can run on ordinary pump gas. Only 1,949 were built.
While Chevrolet spent its advertising budget on the Camaro and the Chevelle, the Nova SS was quietly available with the same 396 big-block in a body several hundred pounds lighter. In 1968 only a few hundred buyers checked that box, which is why genuine big-block cars are so scarce today. Here is what the SS package actually included, how the weight advantage worked, and why proving a car is real matters more than how it looks.