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Ford built the GT350R around a naturally aspirated flat-plane V8 nicknamed ‘Voodoo,’ a design more common in Italian exotics than American pony cars, and stripped weight from everywhere else to match. The result is widely considered the most track-focused factory Mustang Ford has ever produced, one that revives Carroll Shelby’s original 1965 competition mission decades later. Read on to find out what makes this specific test drive worth paying attention to.
Restore a Corvette too close to perfect and purists call foul; restore it too loose and you lose the numbers-matching value collectors chase. This decades-old argument over Corvette restoration standards, factory-correct versus “better than Detroit ever made it,” still splits owners today. Here’s both sides of a debate that has no clean answer.
The 2017 New York International Auto Show brought plenty of new SUVs and market debuts, but one reveal dominated every conversation on the floor: a supercharged Dodge Challenger with Vin Diesel doing the honors on stage. Weeks later, the NHRA’s own governing body would ban the car from competing in its own sport. Read on to find out what Dodge built, and why an entire sanctioning body decided it could not be trusted on the track.
This 1971 Dodge Charger is a first twice over and a last once: the first Hemi Charger of a brand-new body style, and the final year the 426 Hemi was ever offered in one. It was a factory pilot car that was never supposed to be sold at all, yet it escaped and went out the door through one of the most famous Mopar dealerships in America. Read on to find out how small the 1971 Hemi Charger production number really was.
A single option on the 1957 Chevrolet order form turned a mild Bel Air into a car NASCAR banned within months. Rochester fuel injection pushed the 283 small-block to exactly one horsepower per cubic inch, a first for General Motors. This is the story of the Black Widow-era Chevy and the engine that got it kicked out of stock car racing.
Calling a 1962 Chevrolet Impala two-door hardtop sweet barely scratches what that model year actually meant for Chevrolet. A $53.80 trim option that had existed for barely a year was about to become one of the most influential ideas in the company’s history, and at the top of the engine range sat a 409 that made buyers give up their automatic transmission to get it. Read on to find out how the Super Sport took over and how close this hardtop came to the fastest option on the lot.
While the rest of Detroit was detuning engines to survive insurance premiums and emissions rules, Pontiac quietly hand-built one more real muscle car and buried it deep in the Trans Am options sheet. Fewer than 1,200 SD-455s were ever built across two model years, each one carrying a race-spec engine most buyers never even knew was available.
This piece imagined a future where cars drove themselves and the real money went to companies nobody thinks of as automotive: chipmakers, mapmakers, data brokers. Years later, names like Mobileye, Nvidia, and Waymo prove the theory more right than wrong. Here’s how that unlikely list of winners actually played out.
This 1965 Chevrolet C/10 Pickup wears a patina finish its owner never bothered to smooth out, and hides a supercharged small-block Chevy underneath it. Spotted parked at Riffey’s Hot Rods, it’s less a show truck than a genuine sleeper, built to be driven rather than trailered. Watch to see why an unfinished-looking paint job and a blower poking through the hood make for one of the more honest builds on the channel.
A wrecked Dodge Challenger Hellcat with fire damage to its body still carries one of the most valuable engines in the modern muscle car world underneath the scorched sheet metal. The supercharged 707-horsepower Hemi and its heavy-duty eight-speed transmission were both engineered to survive far more abuse than a stock tune ever demands. Read on to find out why builders specifically seek out toasted Hellcat donor cars.
The Chevrolet SS was a genuine rear-wheel-drive V8 sedan hiding in plain sight on American dealer lots for four model years, and most enthusiasts either never noticed it existed or spent years quietly recommending one before it disappeared. Built on a rebadged Holden Commodore platform in Australia, it packed a 415-horsepower LS3 V8 and, eventually, a genuine six-speed manual. Its cancellation had almost nothing to do with American sales. Read on to find out what actually killed it.
US Mustang sales have been sliding as American buyers shift toward SUVs, yet the same car has become the best-selling sports coupe on the planet once global markets are counted. Ford’s decision to engineer the Mustang for right-hand-drive and international emissions standards opened dozens of new markets that had never had legal factory access before. Read on to see how one sales chart can miss the bigger picture entirely.
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.
For four years the 4-4-2 was just another option box on the Cutlass order form. Then 1968 brought an all-new Coke-bottle body and Oldsmobile promoted it to a model of its own, with a 400-cubic-inch V8 hiding the long-stroke crank that would later appear in the 455. Oldsmobile sold 33,607 of them. Read on to find out why the 4-4-2 quietly outran cars that got all the attention.
The fastback roofline on this 1967 Chevrolet Impala did not appear out of nowhere. Chevrolet borrowed the idea from a rival GM division’s flagship coupe, and the result reshaped the full-size Impala for the rest of the decade. Underneath that shape sat one of the widest engine ranges Chevrolet ever offered on a single body, running from a mild inline-six all the way to a 385-horsepower 427. Read on to find out just how far apart the mildest and wildest versions of the same car really were.