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In a stretch of the French Riviera built around Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, and Lamborghinis, one filmmaker spent years documenting a surprising pattern: nothing turns heads in Monaco and Cannes quite like an American V8. From an El Camino stealing the show early on to a Cadillac out-shining a line of Rolls-Royces, this compilation makes the case one reaction shot at a time. Watch to see which American muscle car gets the loudest reaction.
Chevrolet showed up to the pony car fight two and a half years late, and its first attempt had no room for a learning curve. The 1967 Camaro SS answered the Mustang GT feature for feature, then went further with a big-block option Ford could not match. Of 220,906 first-year Camaros, only about 34,000 wore Super Sport badges. Read on for why the first-year SS still sets the template every Camaro since has chased.
A 1972 Chevrolet Corvette with a 454 big block under the hood sounds like a straightforward proposition until you look at what the brochure claimed that year. The same engine that had been advertised at 365 horsepower in 1971 was suddenly rated at 270, and Chevrolet had not touched the hardware. Something else changed instead, and it permanently altered how every American performance car was measured. Read on to find out what happened and why 1972 is a genuine bookend year for the Corvette.
The Coronet R/T only ever came with two engines — Dodge would not let anything softer wear the badge. One was the standard 440 Magnum, rated at 375 horsepower; the other was the far rarer 426 HEMI that turned an unassuming B-body into one of the era’s most feared street cars. By 1970, with just 2,615 R/Ts built out of over 114,000 Coronets, the model was already on its way out in favor of the Charger. Here’s what made this quiet-looking Mopar such a serious machine.
Somebody took a 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1, cut the hood open, and let the engine stand up through the sheet metal in plain view. It is the most literal statement a pro street build can make, and it raises an immediate question about what is actually mounted down there. Ford built 72,458 Mach 1s that year, but only a fraction carried the engine that made the model famous. Read on to find out why builders almost never start with one of those.
Since 2011, one filmmaker has returned every year to check on the same 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona — sitting exactly where it always sits, exposed to the weather, worth potentially 150,000 dollars or more if it were ever restored. Hot Rod Magazine has written about this exact car. Watch to see why one of Dodge’s rarest homologation specials is still rusting away in plain sight.
Chevrolet built 114,630 Camaros for 1971, a fraction of what the nameplate had managed at its peak, with a UAW strike and a federal fuel mandate both squeezing the second generation from opposite directions. Only 4,862 of them were Z/28s. This lightly modified example keeps its interior close to stock, and that restraint says something about where the second-gen market has landed.
By 1972 the muscle car era was ending in slow motion, and Buick’s Gran Sport had already been demoted from a standalone model back to an option package on the Skylark. This survivor still wears its factory paint, original interior, factory vinyl top, and a numbers-matching 350 four-barrel. Here is what actually changed in 1972, why the horsepower ratings dropped so sharply, and why an unmolested GS from this exact year is so hard to find.
The narrator’s own 1979 Pontiac Trans Am was his first car — and, by his own admission, never as fast as it looked. This build, from Steve Holcomb Pro Auto Custom Interiors, fixes that exact problem with a 7.0-liter engine swap and then goes further with one of the most detailed custom interiors the car has ever worn. Watch to see the fix — and the interior work commenters can’t stop talking about.
The 1958 Thunderbird was Ford’s biggest gamble with the nameplate: four seats instead of two, eighteen inches longer, and roughly a thousand pounds heavier. It won Motor Trend Car of the Year and nearly doubled sales in a recession. This one carries a modern Coyote V8 under two-tone gloss white and satin grey, and the restraint is the best part.
PatriotFest in Tulsa puts a car and motorcycle show on the real Route 66, near the Historical Route 66 Village, as part of a festival built to promote the city as the most patriotic in the country. Some owners detail all Friday night, others give their trucks a quick rinse, and for Dudley and Vicky Jones the preparation started years earlier. With proceeds going to local veterans and food trucks and live music on the grounds, read on to see what pulls so many different owners onto the Mother Road for one Saturday morning.
The Ford Mustang was one of the best-selling sports cars in the world when Australia’s ANCAP crash test authority handed it a rare and damaging result: just 2 out of 5 stars. Weak airbag performance, a door that opened in the pole test, and a near-total absence of modern driver aids all factored into the score. Here’s what the testing found, and how Ford eventually responded.
The Camaro ZL1 already had 650 supercharged horsepower and a chassis built to embarrass sports cars twice its price. The 1LE package left that engine untouched and rebuilt everything else instead, chasing a sub-7:17 Nurburgring lap through dampers, aero, and lighter wheels. Read on to see how a track-only variant of an already extreme car earned its own legend.
The 1971 Chevrolet C10 arrived during the single best year Chevrolet’s truck division had ever posted, with 739,478 units built and more than 260,000 C10 pickups among them. It brought standard front disc brakes, a new egg-crate grille, and the debut of the Cheyenne trim package. Finding one that survived five decades without being improved along the way is the hard part.
Steve McQueen’s dark green 1968 Mustang GT fastback is the most influential movie car ever made, and it sold for $3.74 million when it finally resurfaced. So a fastback wearing that same silhouette but built to handle sand rather than San Francisco hills demands a second look. Here is what Max Balchowsky actually built for the film, what happened to both cars, and what it takes to send a classic Mustang off the pavement.