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Everyone at Heartland Park Topeka knew the little Nitrous K5 Blazer called “Open Container” — but it was the driver who stole the show at Street Car Takeover. Running the Street Truck class and the 11.0 index, this scrappy 4×4 kept chipping away at personal bests all day while the pits watched a man who refuses to let a wheelchair define what he can do. It is proof that grit outruns excuses. Watch to see how the day unfolded.
This 1972 Ford Gran Torino Sport carries the 351 Cleveland Cobra Jet, the only engine in that year’s Torino lineup to earn the Cobra Jet name and factory dual exhaust. Decades before Clint Eastwood made the nameplate famous in his 2008 film, Ford was already selling it as its most serious midsize performance option.
Nicknamed Piranha, this heavily reworked 1969 Camaro represents the pro-touring approach to Chevrolet’s most aggressive first-generation styling year, trading factory leaf springs and drum brakes for modern suspension and braking built to handle real corners. Here is what separates a true pro-touring build from a straight-line muscle car.
The 1967 Mercury Cougar beat the brand-new Chevrolet Camaro to Motor Trend’s Car of the Year award in its very first model year, backed by a Mustang-based chassis, hidden headlights, and an available 390-cubic-inch V8. Here is how a slightly more upscale pony car from Lincoln-Mercury managed to out-launch its own corporate cousin.
This lime green Dodge Challenger played a starring role in Furious 7, complete with push bars, a roof-mounted harpoon, and a parachute for its unforgettable cargo plane sequence. Underneath the stunt gear sits a genuinely potent 470-horsepower 6.4-liter HEMI from a 2011 Challenger SRT8. Here is what Dodge actually built into this car.
This fifth-generation Camaro SS started life with a 426-horsepower LS3, then got rebuilt front to back into a widebody machine reportedly making 1,500 horsepower at the rear wheels. Take a look at what separates a factory 2010 Camaro SS from a build pushing nearly four times its original output, and why the body had to change along with the engine.
This 1968 Dodge Charger wears a widebody conversion built around a 440 stroked to 535 cubic inches, Viper-inspired hood louvers, and rear fenders stretched to fit 12-inch-wide tires. A full leather interior from Pro Auto Custom Interiors ties the build together inside. See how this stroker-powered Charger compares to the factory R/T that inspired it.
The most famous Mustang in movie history wasn’t actually a real Shelby GT500 — “Eleanor” from Gone in 60 Seconds was built from ordinary 1967 fastbacks dressed up by designer Chip Foose. Only a handful were built to survive filming, and about half are believed to still exist today. Somehow this tribute car has become more recognizable than most of the genuine GT500s it was styled after.
Buick’s 1970 GSX Stage 1 quietly out-accelerated nearly every rival muscle car of its era, running 13.38 seconds in the quarter-mile, a time Motor Trend called the fastest they had ever tested. The secret was not the modest-looking 360-hp rating on the window sticker, but 510 lb-ft of torque from a reworked 455 Stage 1 V8. Only 678 GSX models were built in 1970, making this yellow-and-black example a rare piece of Buick’s brief muscle car peak.
This battle-scarred 1971 Dodge Challenger spent its screen time disguised as a 1970 R/T 440 Magnum in Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, right down to a window frame welded on so stuntwoman Zoe Bell could strap herself to the hood. Six Challengers were built for the film’s stunt work; only two survive as complete cars today. This is one of the survivors, rediscovered in an Australian garage years after filming wrapped.
This 383-powered 1971 Plymouth Cuda represents the final chapter of an era: 1971 was the last year Plymouth offered the Barracuda with any big-block engine at all. New emissions and horsepower-rating regulations arriving in 1972 would end the big-block Barracuda for good. Built on Chrysler’s E-body platform alongside the Dodge Challenger, it is a genuine piece of muscle car history caught in its final year.
Muscle car memes love to joke that these cars were never meant to follow the rules of the road, and that attitude traces back further than the internet, to Route 66’s postwar reputation as a symbol of American freedom. Ironically, by the time the first true muscle cars hit showrooms in 1964, the interstate system was already erasing the very road that built the myth. The joke survives anyway, kept alive today by cruises and tours chasing that same open-road feeling.
At the 2017 New York Auto Show, Florida-based TransAm Depot unveiled a modern Trans Am 455 Super Duty built on the sixth-generation Camaro’s Alpha platform, packing roughly 1,000 horsepower from a NASCAR-engineered, supercharged 455 cubic-inch V8. Starting around 110,000 dollars, it is less a restomod than a modern continuation of Pontiac’s most legendary muscle car name.