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Midnight Drags at the 2017 Car Craft Summer Nationals marked the event’s first year at its new home, Beech Bend Raceway Park in Bowling Green, Kentucky. A 42-car field battled it out until Michael Goodman’s 1969 Nova came out on top with an 8.01-second pass at 163 mph. The night was successful enough that organizers brought the event back in 2018 with an expanded two-day format.
Randy Smalley waited two years before finally buying this 2017 Shelby GT350R, and when Lou Costabile asked why he pulled the trigger, Randy’s answer was just two words. The white-with-stripes Mustang has racked up over 50,000 views and split opinion in the comments, from praise calling it a “grand slam” for Ford to a sharp-eyed viewer who spotted a panel gap near the headlight. Was the wait worth it, and was the build quality up to the price tag?
For years the Dominator Dart made its reputation on a nitrous-fed Hemi, exactly the way street racing reputations were traditionally built. Then Joe Woods tore the whole combination out and replaced it with a 632-cubic-inch big block Chevrolet and a pair of 88mm turbochargers. In a Mopar. Read on for why a die-hard Dodge racer walked away from the setup that made his name, and what a 1967 A-body brings to the fight.
George Hansen has owned his 1957 Ford Thunderbird since 2012, but the car was living on borrowed time the day it was built. Ford made the two-seat T-Bird for just three model years, and 1957 was the last chance anyone got to buy one before the redesign added a back seat and changed the car’s identity permanently. Buried in that final year’s option list was a supercharged engine roughly two hundred buyers received.
Two hundred miles an hour used to be a number reserved for exotics, not something you ordered at a Ford dealership. Then SVT dropped a 5.8-liter supercharged V8 into the 2013 Mustang and produced 662 horsepower — the most powerful production V8 in the world at the time. It came with one transmission choice and a solid rear axle. Read on for how Ford made all of that work.
Dodge spent months teasing the 2018 Challenger SRT Demon without showing a single performance number, leaning instead on the idea that cold, dense air is what really makes a muscle car. When the specs finally landed, they made the teasing look modest: 840 horsepower, a 9.65-second quarter mile, a factory transbrake, an air conditioner repurposed to chill the intake, and a Guinness record for lifting the front wheels off the ground.
Marlene Ferguson did not ask her husband for jewelry. She asked for the Oldsmobile with the wing on the back, and the search took years before the couple finally found the right 1969 Hurst/Olds 442 in 1988. Just over 900 were ever built, and only because Oldsmobile could not legally install a 455 itself. The car existed for exactly one model year before General Motors changed the rule that made it necessary.
This Highland Green 1968 Mustang GT fastback is a twelve-time MCA national title winner and a two-time National Grand Champion, a record nobody stumbles into against thousands of rival restorations. But the model year itself has a stranger story: a new engine that arrived mid-season almost without announcement, safety equipment nobody asked for, and a fastback body style that actually sold worse than the plain hardtop. Here is what makes a 1968 GT worth this much attention.
Cleaning bare metal is the least glamorous job in any restoration, and getting it wrong can ruin paint months after the car leaves the booth. Chemical dipping traps acid in seams. Sandblasting warps panels and carries a silica hazard. Coal slag sits in between, with real advantages and a health asterisk most shops never mention. Here is how the media choices actually break down, and where each one belongs.
This 1970 Pontiac GTO Judge convertible carries the Ram Air IV 400 and a Muncie four-speed, a combination so scarce that Pontiac historians still argue about how many were actually built. Judge production was small, convertible Judge production was smaller, and the Ram Air IV narrowed it further still. Some tallies put surviving examples in the low double digits. Read on for the numbers, the documentation problem, and why this spec sets the ceiling for the entire GTO market.
Justin’s ProCharged C7 Corvette had to survive daily driving and 10-second quarter-mile passes on the same set of parts, which is a much harder brief than it sounds. Getting there meant multiple teardowns and finding the platform’s weak links the expensive way, before the car finally debuted at Street Car Takeover’s 2016 season opener in Phoenix. Read on to find out what a centrifugal blower actually does to a mostly stock C7.
This 1969 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray wears one of ten factory colors offered that year, and most people could not name it with the car in front of them. Behind the paint question sits a more interesting one: 1969 was the best-selling Shark-bodied Corvette to that point, and it offered an engine option that exactly two customers in America ever bought. Read on for the production figures, the color chart, and the ZL1 story.
At the 2016 Goodguys Nashville Nationals, more than 2,500 hot rods, muscle cars, and customs filled the infield at Nashville Superspeedway for a weekend billed as “America’s Favorite Car Show.” The event doubles as a proving ground through the Tanks, Inc. Hot Rod of the Year competition, which includes a 100-mile reliability run on real roads. Closing time brings its own reward, when hundreds of engines fire up at once for the drive home.
A Corvette lining up against a Blue Angels F/A-18 Hornet sounds like a foregone conclusion, and over enough distance it absolutely is. But the test was a sprint to 100 mph, not a race to top speed, and that distinction changes everything. The ZR1 nicknamed Blue Devil brought 638 supercharged horsepower and carbon ceramic brakes. Read on for why the short-run format made this closer than it had any right to be.
Seven identical 1970 Dodge Challengers were built for a single Quentin Tarantino stunt sequence, and most of them did not survive the shoot in driveable condition. One of the survivors now lives in Finland, legally registered, dents and all. It was never even the most dangerous car on that set. Read on for how a purpose-built stunt car ends up street-legal on the other side of the Atlantic decades later.