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By 1976 the muscle car era was supposedly finished, yet Pontiac was still selling a Trans Am with 455 cubic inches under a shaker scoop and a four-speed behind it. The catch is how briefly that combination existed and how few people could actually order it. This is the story of Detroit’s last big-inch holdout and why 200 horsepower meant more than the number suggests.
Tom Lembeck owns one of roughly 39 surviving 1969 Dodge Daytona Chargers built with a genuine factory 426 Hemi, and instead of trailering it to shows, he drives it through Chicago traffic and lays rubber in parking lots. Viewers called his willingness to use a seven-figure wing car ‘Hallelujah’-worthy. Once an unsold oddity gathering dust on dealer lots, this NASCAR homologation special is now one of the most coveted Mopars in existence. See what makes Lembeck’s Daytona different.
The 1969 Pontiac GTO everyone remembers wears Judge decals and a rear spoiler. The one enthusiasts quietly prefer wears neither. A 400-cubic-inch four-barrel, a close-ratio four-speed, and 445 lb-ft arriving at just 3,000 rpm made the undecorated GTO the better street car by almost every measure that matters. Here is why the plain one keeps winning the argument.
When Ford pulled the covers off the 2018 Mustang convertible, the biggest news was not what got added. It was what quietly disappeared from the order sheet after decades of being the default choice for droptop buyers. What replaced it split the lineup into two extremes with nothing in the middle, and gave the convertible a dashboard that had no business being in a pony car. Read on for what changed.
The fastest engine Ford offered in the 1966 Mustang had no badge, no brochure spread, and no salesman pushing it. It hid behind a single letter in the vehicle identification number, and fewer than one percent of that year’s buyers ever checked the box. What that letter bought you was a solid-lifter V8 built to rev like a race engine, and the details that give it away are still the first thing collectors look for.
No car show in the country claims a longer unbroken run than the one that kicks off the West Coast’s season every January — and its nine-foot America’s Most Beautiful Roadster trophy has been chased by legendary builders for generations. What started as a tightly focused 1950 roadster show in Oakland has grown into an everything-under-one-roof event covering tri-fives, muscle cars, customs, and rat rods.
In 1966, Ford and Carroll Shelby handed roughly a thousand genuine Shelby GT350s to Hertz and let anyone with a license and a credit card rent one by the weekend. The Rent-A-Racer program moved GT350 production from a few hundred cars to 2,378, generated decades of lore about roll bars and race numbers, and produced one of the most collectible Mustang variants ever built. Here is how it actually happened.
Stock-motor, stock-turbo quarter-mile racing is a surprisingly competitive corner of the Porsche 911 world, where a handful of tenths separates casual bragging rights from an actual record. This twin-turbo 911 leans on nitrous and drag radials rather than internal engine work to chase that record — a very different game than the heavily built cars dominating the outright quarter-mile books.
A heavily built Ford Falcon XY GT crossed the traps at 200.74 mph in Sydney’s 275 Tire class, a number its own video title undersold as nearly 200. Built by Dandy Engineering, one of Australia’s most respected drag shops, the run has become a reference point for Falcon fans years later. Watch to see American power and Australian engineering meet at the top end.
When Rich Sperling bought this 1959 Pontiac Catalina in 1991, the Wisconsin seller practically talked him out of it, insisting nobody around wanted a Pontiac over a Chevy. More than three decades later, Sperling still owns the Silver Mist Sport Sedan, complete with its original four-on-the-tree manual transmission. Watch to hear the full story behind a car nearly nobody wanted.
Dodge spent twelve separate teaser videos building up to the Challenger SRT Demon, and this installment hinted at something no factory muscle car had claimed before: a car sold with its own crate of drag strip tools. The Demon arrived with drag radials, a transbrake, and a horsepower figure that required a trip to the race gas pump. Read on to find out how far Dodge actually went to back up the “dual purpose” claim.
Somewhere in Australia sits a 1976 Ford Falcon XB coupe that answers to a name most owners would never give their car: XBOSS. The XB hardtop is the shape that gave Australia its own muscle car identity, put a Falcon in one of the most famous movies ever made, and then vanished from the lineup almost as quickly as it arrived. Read on to find out why a two-door Falcon still commands this kind of reverence half a century later.
Carroll Shelby did not turn the Mustang into a race car with horsepower. He did it with a rulebook technicality so blunt that the first cars had a spare tire bolted where the back seat used to be, purely so the SCCA would classify them as two-seat sports cars. That trick launched three straight championships and a car that is now essentially unobtainable. Read on for how it actually worked.
Shelby put the words King of the Road on a 1968 Mustang, which is the kind of claim that requires backing up. It got a different engine than the GT500 it replaced, a reinforced chassis, and for one single model year, a convertible body. Finding one of those droptops under decades of barn dust is the sort of discovery that ends with a phone call to a registry. Here is why it matters.
Justin Bieber’s Ferrari was just one of many high-profile cars at this Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale sale, alongside NASCAR and Hollywood names on hand for the show. The event traces back to a 1967 local car show turned annual auction empire. Here is how it grew, and why some of the cars on the block that day were not for profit at all.