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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.
A nitro Top Fuel car has no transmission and no gear changes, which means the clutch alone meters roughly eleven thousand horsepower to the tires across the entire run. It is tuned by adding and removing steel counterweights measured in grams, runs at friction temperatures near 3,700 degrees, and gets rebuilt between nearly every round. Here is how the system actually works, and why the clutch is where a nitro race is really won.
A company in Sweetwater, Tennessee that normally molds fiberglass boat hulls built the body for this 1957 Chevrolet as a single continuous shell, working from an Eric Brockmeyer design. Underneath sits an Art Morrison chassis, a twin-turbocharged 540-cubic-inch all-aluminum Brodix, a Lenco four-speed, and Wilwood 14-inch brakes. Read on to find out what happens when boat builders decide to build a Tri-Five.
A Fox-body Mustang assembled from an LSX swap, an 88mm turbo, and whatever else worked became one of the most feared street cars in Houston, and it got its name out of pure spite toward a rival called White Devil. By the time it lined up against a 1,500-horsepower twin-turbo Lamborghini Gallardo, it had already beaten cars worth ten times what it cost. Read on to find out how a junkyard budget gets you there.
A 2016 Lamborghini Aventador Superveloce rolled into an ordinary Scottsdale Cars and Coffee meet, and Lou Costabile’s camera was there to catch it. The SV badge is not just trim, it marks the most track-focused, weight-stripped version of Lamborghini’s V12 flagship, and reactions in the comments came from as far away as Cairo. Watch to see what happens when an exotic this rare parks next to the regulars.
Ford pulled strangers off the street at Irwindale Speedway in 2017, handed them a new Mustang, and told them to make smoke. The occasion was line lock becoming standard on every 2018 Mustang, four-cylinder EcoBoost models included, not just the V8 GT. Here is exactly what the system does to the brakes, why drag racers have used the trick for decades, and the fifteen-second limit almost nobody mentions.
For a few months in 1966 you could walk into a Hertz counter, hand over a driver’s license, and drive away in a Shelby GT350 built to Carroll Shelby’s own specification. A thousand of them went into the rental fleet in black and gold. The stories that came back are the reason the program did not last. This black-and-gold 1966 is a tribute to those cars, and read on for why the originals are so hard to find intact.
A close-up of chrome-laden headlights doesn’t give away the model year on its own, but it does tell you this is a Ford Thunderbird built during the era when brightwork sold cars. Ford built the T-Bird to beat the brand-new Corvette at its own game — and it worked, generation after generation, from lean two-seaters to big-block four-seaters that broke sales records. Which chapter of that story is parked in this garage?
By 1973 nearly every American manufacturer had detuned or killed its performance models. Buick quietly kept the Stage 1 package alive, pairing a 455 V8 with one of the strongest torque figures left in an American passenger car. Only 728 buyers ordered it, and this one adds the low-take-rate Sun Coupe roof on top. Read on for what Stage 1 actually delivered in 1973 and why the numbers get confused with the 1970 GSX.
A 1970 Chevelle convertible built around a supercharged LS9 sounds like a one-line spec sheet, but the engine is arguably the least modified thing about this car. Every panel has been reworked, and the LS9 it borrows comes from the C6 Corvette ZR1 with 638 horsepower from the factory. The Chevelle it replaces was already the most powerful car Chevrolet ever sold. Read on for what a build like this is really chasing.
For nearly three decades, Canadian buyers could drive home a Pontiac that was mechanically almost entirely Chevrolet, running the same frame, the same body shell, and the same small block or big block under the hood. The Parisienne was not a lazy shortcut; it was a deliberate market strategy that let Canadian Pontiac dealers sell a full-size car at all. It finally came south of the border for 1983. Read on to find out why collectors still argue about whether it counts.
The 1969 Mustang Mach 1 offered four different engines under the same blacked-out hood, and two of them wore identical 351 badges while making figures forty horsepower apart. The M-code four-barrel Windsor produced 290 horsepower on 10.7:1 compression; the two-barrel version made 250. The stripe kit looks the same either way. Ford built 72,458 Mach 1s that year. Read on to find out how to tell which one you’re standing in front of.