 |
The Original Super Chevy Show’s stop in Martin, Michigan runs on a track with real history: US131 Motorsports Park started life as Martin Dragway back in 1962, long before a million renovation turned it into today’s national-touring-ready facility. The event’s entry rule is just as distinctive, any car can compete, even a Mustang, as long as it’s GM-powered. Here’s what made this particular weekend more than just another drag meet.
Gar Robinson’s Trans Am TA2 win in Detroit wasn’t just a race result, it closed out a 29-year family pursuit that started with his father George Robinson’s own attempts at the Motor City event back in 1988. Robinson started from pole, held off former IndyCar driver Rafa Matos in a late two-lap shootout, and beat out competitors in Mustangs and Challengers alike. Here’s the story behind the finish.
The 2015 Corvette Z06 and 2016 Dodge Viper ACR represent the last great showdown between two very different American supercar philosophies — one built around forced induction, the other around a massive naturally aspirated V10 and extreme aerodynamics. Both cars claim 0-60 runs in the neighborhood of 3 seconds, with the lighter Viper ACR clawing back the Z06’s 5-horsepower edge through sheer weight savings. Here’s how these two American icons actually compare, and why the debate over which one is better still hasn’t been settled.
A 1968 Shelby GT500KR convertible that spent nearly forty years off the road resurfaced after being tracked down by a longtime collector who remembered seeing it decades earlier in small-town Tennessee. Only 517 GT500KR convertibles were built in 1968, the only year the King of the Road came in open-top form, out of 1,570 total KR production. Its Cobra Jet V8 was officially rated at 335 horsepower, though period testing suggested Ford badly underrated the real output.
1971 marked the year GM started reporting horsepower in weaker net figures and lowered compression across the board, and the Camaro wore both changes on its spec sheet. The Z28 still packed a 350-cube LT-1 good for 330 horsepower and came with heavy-duty suspension, dual exhaust, and F60-15 tires, but only 4,862 were built that year. The SS did a little better at 8,377 units, but neither number touches the Camaro’s earlier peak years. Which makes a genuine ’71 Z28 or SS a lot rarer than most people assume.
Chevy sold over 220,000 Camaros in its debut 1967 season, but only 602 of them wore the Z/28 option code — Vince Piggins’ quietly-introduced, race-ready package that turned an ordinary pony car into one of GM’s rarest muscle machines. Add in a 396-powered Indy 500 pace car pedigree from that same first year, and the ’67 Camaro didn’t just answer the Mustang, it arrived swinging. A six-cylinder base car and a numbers-matching Z/28 both wear the same badge — but only one of them is a genuine unicorn.
Only about 71 Hemi-powered 1971 Dodge Challengers were built before Dodge pulled the plug on the street 426 for good. The $892 option scared off most buyers, and the last-year styling changes split opinion among Mopar fans. What survived is one of the rarest Challengers ever built, and the story behind why so few people ordered it says a lot about where the muscle car era was headed by 1971.
The 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon didn’t just outrun its Hellcat sibling, it got banned from NHRA-sanctioned drag strips before customers ever got their hands on one. A reworked supercharged 6.2-liter HEMI V8 pushed output to 840 horsepower and 770 lb-ft of torque, enough for a 9.65-second quarter mile and a Guinness-certified wheelie record. Dodge built just 3,300 examples total, turning a street-legal coupe into one of the most extreme production cars Detroit has ever sold.
A supercharged 1969 Plymouth Barracuda, filmed in a single unbroken take at a Finnish cruise night, is not the kind of muscle car most fans expect to find thousands of miles from Detroit. Jamboolio caught the burnout, the exhaust note, and the acceleration run that followed, all without a single cut to hide behind. Vantaa Cruising has built a reputation for exactly this kind of genuine, imported American iron. Watch to see whether the blower lives up to its own hype.
This 1968 Mustang GT fastback carries something rarer than good looks: a fully documented S-code pedigree, verified down to the VIN stamp that separates a genuine 390-powered GT from six-cylinder cars wearing the same badges. Quality Classics photographed every angle and every option code, the kind of paper trail serious collectors demand before taking a fastback seriously. It shares its body style and engine family with the car that made a certain 1968 detective film famous. See what fifty photos of documentation actually reveal.
Buick’s Gran Sport never got the GTO’s headlines, but the numbers tell a different story. A 340-horsepower Wildcat V8, sub-7-second 0-60 times, and a genuine sleeper reputation made the 1966 Skylark GS a serious performer wearing a luxury badge. Only 13,816 were built that year out of over 106,000 Skylarks, making this one of the most overlooked muscle cars of the mid-1960s.
This 1963 Ford Thunderbird convertible represents one of the rarest factory configurations of its generation. While most 1963 T-Birds carried a 300-horsepower 390 V8, this triple-carb “M-code” version bumped output to 340 horsepower — and Ford sold just 55 of them all year. Add in that only 5,913 of 63,313 Thunderbirds built in 1963 were convertibles, and a well-preserved example like this becomes genuinely hard to find.
This 1970 Chevrolet Nova hides a built 355 small-block — forged pistons, a solid cam, roller rockers, and a Holley four-barrel — behind a plain, straight body with no rust. It’s a modern take on the same sleeper formula that made factory Nova SS models, with their optional 375-horsepower 396 big block, a favorite among budget-minded muscle car builders. There’s nothing about its looks that hints at what’s under the hood.
This 1969 Chevrolet Camaro SS396 carries the L78, the 375-horsepower big block Chevrolet reserved for buyers chasing real performance, wrapped in Hugger Orange with D90 stripes and the correct X66 SS package. Oddly, the original buyer skipped the tachometer and special gauges — an unusual choice for an L78 order. Filmed in Dallas by samspace81, the car is offered for sale for a limited time. Watch to see what else makes this build stand out.