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The 2017 Shelby GT350’s 5.2-liter Voodoo V8 used a flat-plane crankshaft, revved to 8,250 rpm, and made 526 horsepower without a turbo or a supercharger anywhere in sight. It was hand-assembled by two-person teams on a dedicated line, sounded more like a Ferrari than a Mustang, and lasted five model years before Ford moved on. Owners still treat surviving examples as a limited-run specialty engine rather than an ordinary Mustang V8. Read on for why.
The LeSabre name did not start as a car. It started as a jet-inspired 1951 GM Motorama show piece so popular that General Motors kept displaying it for years. By 1960 it was Buick’s entry-level full-size line, and the convertible is the version worth remembering, with returning VentiPorts, a brand-new Tri-Shield badge, and a 364 V8 that could be ordered to run on regular gas. Read on for what made 1960 a turning point for Buick.
1320video found one of the more unhinged builds on the street car scene: a Mini weighing barely 1000 pounds with a 250-horsepower Suzuki Hayabusa motorcycle engine wedged inside. Fitting two adults is described as a genuine squeeze, and the power-to-weight math puts it well past most factory muscle cars. One commenter’s verdict – fun once, horrible – says everything about what riding along is actually like. Watch to see this featherweight terror in action.
A Dodge Challenger Hellcat and Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 lined up for a rolling highway pull, the kind of real-world test that does not always agree with drag-strip time slips. The Hellcat’s 57-horsepower advantage on paper met the ZL1’s lighter chassis and quicker-spooling supercharger on the open road. Read on to see why the result depended more on speed range and gearing than on the horsepower figures alone.
One word was all the original post offered about this 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air, and it might be all that needs saying. Chevrolet built these by the hundreds of thousands and got outsold by Ford that year anyway, yet it is the ’57 Chevy that ended up on every poster and in every movie. The reason comes down to tailfins, a fuel-injected small block, and one number that changed how Americans talked about engines.
A pair of 88-millimeter turbochargers mounted directly in the grille of a first-generation Camaro is not a subtle build choice, and it is not meant to be. Turbos that size are reserved for big-block combinations chasing four-digit power, and everything behind them has to be built to match. Read on to find out what a setup like this actually commits a builder to, and why the first-gen body keeps getting chosen for it.
This nearly-finished 1978 Pontiac Trans Am restoration wears the black-and-gold look every Bandit fan recognizes, but its real story is more complicated than the movie fame suggests. From the W72 400 under the hood to the WS6 handling package and the Y82 Special Edition trim, here’s what actually made this car an icon. Read on to find out what set a genuine survivor apart from the thousands of clones that followed.
The 1970 Ford Mustang Boss 302 was not built because buyers wanted one. It existed because SCCA Trans-Am rules capped engines at 305 cubic inches and demanded that Ford sell street versions before it could race. That single requirement shaped the engine, the suspension, and even the name. Read on for the rulebook, the Cleveland-headed 302 underneath, and the championship that finally made it all worthwhile.
Buick’s 1965 Riviera Gran Sport hid a 360-horsepower Nailhead V8 under one of Detroit’s most restrained personal luxury coupe bodies, backed by the tagline ‘the iron fist in a velvet glove.’ Fewer than 3,500 buyers ever checked the option box, making it arguably the rarest performance Buick of the decade. Read on to find out why this sleeper still flies under the radar.
Before Mopar’s High-Impact color names became legend, a handful of green paint codes only existed for a single model year, vivid enough to earn nicknames like Sublime and Sassy Grass. This piece traces where those shades came from, why some vanished within twelve months, and how a traffic-light-inspired green ended up on some of the boldest muscle cars of 1969 and 1970.
Street Outlaws built its reputation on real grudge matches between real cars, and few rivalries carried more weight than Kye Kelley’s nitrous-fed Camaro, the Shocker, squaring off against a twin-turbo rival known as the Mistress. Nitrous versus turbos is one of drag racing’s oldest arguments, and this matchup played it out in front of a national television audience. Read on to find out how a garage-built Camaro became one of the most recognized cars in the entire street racing scene.
This 1965 Mercury Comet wears the sponsor decals and drag-strip stance of a car built to race — and it’s channeling a genuinely wild piece of history. Roughly two dozen factory Comet Cyclones once terrorized NHRA’s A/FX class with dual-quad 427s under the hood, arguably helping invent the Funny Car along the way.
This 1973 Ford Mustang Mach 1, powered by a two-barrel 351 Cleveland and loaded with comfort options like a cassette radio and tilt wheel, quietly marked the final year of the original first-generation Mustang platform. Ford built fewer Mach 1s that year than any other in the option’s run before downsizing the entire lineup for 1974. Read on to see what made this overlooked model year different.
Dodge’s teaser campaign for the 2018 Challenger SRT Demon leaned entirely on math instead of marketing hype, previewing a launch force over 35 percent higher than the already-brutal Hellcat. With 840 horsepower on race fuel, a one-seat factory configuration, and only 3,000 units built, the Demon turned out to be one of the most deliberately extreme muscle cars Detroit has ever sold. Read on for the numbers behind the teaser.
Barely more than a hundred buyers ordered a 426 Hemi in their 1967 Dodge Charger, which is exactly why Dodge occasionally sent one to the auto show circuit instead of a customer. The Street Hemi was rated at 425 horsepower and cost roughly a quarter of the car’s base price on its own. Add the Charger’s own weak sales that year and the survivors become genuinely scarce. Read on to find out what made this combination so hard to sell.