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The 1960 Chevrolet El Camino is the model year most people skip past, and it is quietly the most interesting one. It was the last season Chevy built the El Camino on the full-size passenger car platform before dropping the nameplate entirely for three years, and sales had already fallen hard from the debut. A 350 small-block firing up under the hood of one is a giveaway too, because Chevrolet had not built that engine yet.
This Iris Mist 1965 Pontiac GTO carries the 389 Tri-Power, a four-speed, and a rotisserie restoration that leaves nothing to argue about. It also carries an option General Motors was about to take away from every division except Chevrolet’s Corvette, which is exactly why fewer than a third of that year’s GTOs have it. Read on to find out what those three carburetors were really worth.
Ten days before the biggest radial tire race of the year, Keith Berry’s Corvette did not have a running engine in it. He sourced a fresh 487-cubic-inch combination, had it installed, and took it to Lights Out 7 without a single shakedown pass, with a $50,000 payday on the line. What happened in the final round against Stevie Jackson has been argued about ever since. Read on to find out how the gamble paid off.
The 2017 Ford Mustang GT did not win its reputation by having the biggest horsepower number in the showroom, because it did not have it. The Camaro SS made more, the Hellcat made far more, and Ford’s own Shelby GT350 made nearly a hundred more. Yet reviewers kept coming back to the 435-horsepower 5.0 as the one that got the whole formula right. Read on to find out what Ford changed around the engine.
Hidden in a Texas garage since 1977, this 1965 Corvair Monza 140 emerged with just 29,000 original miles and all its factory parts still attached. It also happens to represent the exact model year Chevrolet fixed the rear suspension flaw that made the Corvair infamous. Read on to find out what changed underneath, and why 1965 became the best-selling year the nameplate ever had.
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.
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.