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This 1971 Plymouth ‘Cuda carries the model’s only four-headlight styling and arrived in the final season Plymouth offered the 426 Hemi — a combination that made fewer than 120 Hemi ‘Cudas among the rarest muscle cars Plymouth ever built. Read on to find out what was happening in the market that made Plymouth’s most powerful car also its rarest.
This 1970 Dodge Challenger wears Panther Pink, a genuine factory paint option that took real nerve to order on a muscle car. Underneath it sits a 440, and Dodge offered that engine two very different ways that year. One had a single four-barrel and 375 horsepower; the other stacked three two-barrels on the same block and turned it into something close to a factory drag car. Read on to find out which 440 was actually the one to have.
Pontiac rated the 1969 GTO’s Ram Air IV at 370 horsepower, and almost nobody who worked on the engine believed that figure. Round-port heads, a long-duration camshaft, and an aluminum intake made it far closer to a factory race engine than a street option, and Pontiac reportedly lost money on every one it built. Read on to find out why a company would sell a car at a loss just to put a number on a spec sheet.
Ryan Martin’s Fireball Camaro, tuned to roughly 3,000 horsepower on its small turbos, lines up for a $50,000 no prep grudge match at the Armageddon event. The pass did not go the way the horsepower numbers suggested it should, and 1320video even had to correct an earlier version of the footage afterward. Watch to see how a half million dollar build stacked up against a reputation four seasons of Street Outlaws built.
A handful of original miles can be worth more than a six-figure restoration. Collectible cars with fewer than 100 miles routinely sell for 88 percent above guide value, and even 1,000-mile examples carry a 60 to 67 percent premium. Starting from Porsche’s decision to retire its millionth 911 to a museum, this piece digs into why untouched originality commands such a steep price, what actually qualifies a car as a survivor, and what every mile really costs an owner.
Turbocharging an engine that never had forced induction from the factory is one of the most rewarding upgrades in the hobby and one of the most misunderstood. The turbo itself is the easy part; fuel delivery, tuning, intercooling, boost control, oil and exhaust plumbing, and sometimes the engine’s own internals all have to change with it. This guide explains how boost works, why lag exists, how much is realistic, and the order that keeps a project from ending with a tow truck. Read on to find out what the weekend-job crowd leaves out.
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. Read on for both sides of a debate that has no clean answer, and the questions that help you pick your own.
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 fuel-injection option on the 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air made exactly one horsepower per cubic inch, a first for General Motors, and it turned a mild-mannered family sedan into something NASCAR banned outright after it dominated early in the season. Read on to find out how a $500 option box created the car enthusiasts still call the Black Widow.
As insurance surcharges and emissions rules were strangling the muscle car era, Pontiac quietly built one final genuine performance engine: the SD-455. Hand-assembled with race-grade internals and installed in a Firebird lineup that had nearly been canceled, fewer than 300 examples were built for 1973. Read on to find out why enthusiasts still consider it Pontiac’s best-kept secret.
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.