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Roy Brizio grew up around his father’s South San Francisco speed shop and turned that upbringing into one of hot rodding’s most respected builder names. His 1987 America’s Most Beautiful Roadster win put him on the map, and clients like Eric Clapton and Neil Young have kept him building for over four decades. Here is the story behind one of hot rodding’s quiet legends.
Chad Hill and the team at Hot Rod Chassis and Cycle built a 1967 Chevelle called Rush for road racing, not drag strips, complete with a front splitter, rear wing, and a Ridetech Tiger Cage suspension. Turning a car built for straight lines into a genuine corner carver takes more than bolt-on parts. Here is what goes into a build like this.
Long before Tallahassee had a legal place to race, drivers settled things on remote Leon County roads like Mission Road. The city’s answer was a sanctioned strip on west Highway 20, built in the mid-1960s as drag racing nationwide moved out of the shadows. Here is a look back at that transition and the outlaw scene it never fully replaced.
A dashboard puck that plugged into any car and projected navigation, texts, and calls onto the windshield sounded like the future in 2015. Navdy raised over a million dollars in a week and shipped thousands of units before quietly shutting down in 2019. Here is what doomed one of the most promising aftermarket heads-up displays ever built.
Mercury built over 10,000 Cyclone GT hardtops for 1970, but fewer than 400 got the 429 Cobra Jet engine that made the model legendary. Between the Thunder Jet, Cobra Jet, and Super Cobra Jet, the option sheet hid three very different cars under one body. Here’s what actually separated a mild Cyclone from a genuine stoplight terror.
Don Yenko took the humblest car on the Chevrolet lot and dropped in the same 350-cubic-inch engine found in the Z-28 Camaro and LT1 Corvette. Only 175 of these 1970 Nova Yenko Deuces were built, each finished off with a giveaway hood-mounted tachometer. Here’s how a bench-seat economy car became a genuine muscle car in disguise.
The 2011 Chevrolet Camaro SS convertible out-muscled the Ford Mustang GT convertible on paper, with 426 horsepower to the Mustangs 412, yet the lighter Mustang still reached 60 mph faster. A 413-pound weight difference between the two convertibles explains most of the gap, proving raw horsepower does not always decide a fight. Handling and safety scores split the difference further, with the Mustang favored for dynamics and the Camaro for standard side airbags. Nearly identical pricing meant buyers picked based on personality, not the spec sheet.
Fords unibody F-100 lasted only three model years, from 1961 to 1963, before its one-piece cab-and-bed construction proved too weak to reliably haul cargo. That short production run is exactly why survivors are rare today, and why builders favor them for custom projects rather than restoration. This example takes that logic further, dropping a modern Coyote V8 into a slammed, ruby-painted build with a fully custom interior. It turns Fords short-lived engineering failure into a genuinely unique custom platform.
This 1969 Chevrolet Camaro Z/28 hides one of the most underrated engines Chevrolet ever built – a 302 cubic inch small-block designed purely to satisfy a racing rulebook, officially rated at 290 horsepower but widely believed to make closer to 375. Backed by a close-ratio Muncie 4-speed and built only as a coupe, it’s the car Trans-Am racing accidentally turned into a legend. Here’s the story behind the numbers Chevrolet never fully admitted to.
1970 should have been the year Plymouth played it safe with the Road Runner, as insurance surcharges gutted sales and buyers fled toward smaller, cheaper muscle. Instead, Plymouth kept the 426 Hemi on the order sheet, even though only a tiny handful of buyers actually checked that box. This bright yellow survivor, photographed at a car show decades later, is a reminder of just how far Plymouth was willing to go before the muscle car era finally ran out of road.
Just 70 of the 503 Dodge Charger Daytonas built for 1969 carried the optional 426 Hemi instead of the standard 440 Magnum, making this black-and-white example one of the rarest homologation specials ever sold to the public. Dodge built the Daytona purely to satisfy NASCARs aerodynamic rules, wrapping a standard Charger in a fiberglass nose cone and a towering rear wing. The gamble worked: the Daytona became the first car to break 200 mph in NASCAR competition. Few muscle cars did so much because of a single racing rulebook.
Ford sold over 600,000 Mustangs in 1966, but a factory four-speed convertible with the 289 V8 represents a far narrower slice of that production run than most buyers realize. Three different states of tune hid under the same 289 badge that year, each changing how the car actually drives. Add the deluxe Pony interior and styled steel wheels, and this particular convertible checks boxes that were surprisingly uncommon on drop-tops. It is the rare early Mustang that backs up its reputation with the right options.
Only 108 Pontiac GTO Judge convertibles left the factory in 1969, and this black example runs the streetable Ram Air III rather than the race-tuned Ram Air IV most collectors chase. The Judge package began as a budget alternative to the Plymouth Road Runner before becoming the GTOs performance flagship almost by accident. Its striped paint and rear spoiler are instantly recognizable, but the numbers under the hood tell the real story of what this car can do.
A record crowd of 90,000 turned out when Barrett-Jackson brought its collector car auction to Mohegan Sun Casino for the first time. More than 500 vehicles sold for over $26 million, led by a 1969 Chevrolet Corvette L88. See what made this Northeast debut one for the record books — and why it’s still growing.
Finished in its original Carousel Red, this 1969 Pontiac Firebird 400 convertible represents the final and most aggressive year of the first-generation body style before a full redesign arrived in 1970. Pontiac offered three distinct versions of the 400-cubic-inch V8 that year, and the difference between a standard convertible and a numbers-matching Ram Air car can swing its value dramatically. Power steering and a power top hint at how this particular car was ordered. The fender tag tells a story the paint alone never could.