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A week living with a 485-horsepower Dodge Challenger R/T Scat Pack turns out to teach lessons no spec sheet can capture, from how differently the power delivers on real roads to how often the fuel gauge needs checking. It’s the kind of experience that reshapes what people expect from a modern muscle car before the loaner week is even over. Here’s what stood out most.
A 2017 Ford GT — one of the most exclusive supercars Ford has ever built — meets a Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 for a real track session, with both drivers working through their first laps in these specific cars. The ZL1 was engineered to hang with exotics costing multiples of its price, and this footage puts that claim to the test in real conditions, mistakes included. It’s unpolished, unscripted, and more revealing because of it. Watch to see how close the gap really is.
Most hot rod builders chase horsepower with a turbocharger or a bigger cam — but a rare few skip straight to doubling their cylinder count instead. A 14-liter V16 swap sounds like something out of a tall tale, yet boutique engine builders have made versions of it real, repurposing marine and industrial architecture for street use. Here’s what it takes to shoehorn sixteen cylinders into a car that was never designed to hold them.
Known simply as ‘The Hulk,’ this 1967 Chevy Nova runs a pair of 88mm Pro-Mod turbochargers and puts down roughly 2,500 horsepower — enough to run the quarter-mile in the very low seven-second range. The build has been featured on Discovery Channel’s Street Outlaws. What makes it even more surprising is the starting point: the Nova was originally Chevrolet’s compact economy car, not a performance model, before drag racers turned its light unibody into a favorite extreme-build platform.
Pontiac built just 697 Firebird Trans Ams for 1969 — including only eight convertibles — making the white-and-blue debut year one of the rarest genuine muscle cars Pontiac ever built. Standard power came from a 335-horsepower Ram Air III 400, but 55 buyers paid extra for the even punchier 345-horsepower Ram Air IV. It flopped commercially at the time. Decades later, that same scarcity is exactly why collectors chase a numbers-matching example so hard.
The original 1965 Shelby Cobra 427 was factory-rated at 410 horsepower in street trim and around 485 in Competition spec — numbers that made it the fastest American road car of its day. Higher figures like 575 horsepower typically come from later continuation builds and restomods running modern crate engines in that same iconic body. Genuine 1965 cars are exceptionally rare, with only 53 of the required 100 homologation cars completed before Shelby’s deadline passed.
Plymouth built only 114 Hemi Cudas for 1971, with just 12 convertibles among them, numbers so small that two brothers who wrote down an impossibly specific wish list, unrestored, four-speed, original owner, build sheet included, figured the search would take years. They found their car in three weeks. Genuine, documented originals from this ultra-low-production run have sold for well over a million dollars at auction.
Only one of the four Trans Ams built for Smokey and the Bandit survived filming intact, yet the movie still helped turn a slow-selling Pontiac into a sales phenomenon. Discover what really happened on set, how the film rescued the Trans Am’s reputation, and why Burt Reynolds’ personal cars still draw huge money at auction.
This 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T convertible hides one of the rarest option combinations Dodge ever built — a 426 Hemi, a four-speed manual, and a drop top, a pairing only five cars in the world ever received. Its Plum Crazy Purple paint and factory Fender tag tell a story of Mopar’s most feared engine losing out to the more practical 440 Six Pack at the dealership. Today it’s a seven-figure unicorn from the Brothers Collection. Watch to see why Don Garlits himself once used the words “triple tough” to describe it.
