 |
A battered Dodge Challenger sat forgotten in an Australian garage for years, its owner unaware of what he had until he saw the same car in a movie trailer. It is a 1971 dressed as a 1970, built to survive one of the most dangerous practical stunts of the 2000s, with reinforced door frames welded on so a stuntwoman could ride the hood. Read on for how it was built, how it was found, and what a screen-used car is really worth.
A 1971 Plymouth Barracuda lighting up its rear tires is a good time on its own, but the year on the fender is the part that matters. This was the last season Plymouth would sell a Barracuda with a big-block of any kind, the last year for the convertible, and the last year before horsepower ratings changed forever. The 383 under this hood was already living on borrowed time. Read on to find out why 1971 ended the E-body as buyers knew it.
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.
This unassuming Chevy Nova hides a twin-turbocharged 406 cubic-inch small-block making over 800 horsepower, enough to run the quarter-mile in the 9-second range. On the street, it has reportedly beaten heavily modified GT-Rs and gone toe-to-toe with supercharged Corvettes. But big turbo power on a decades-old chassis is a high-wire act, where one hard pass can turn triumph into a very expensive failure.
Before anyone saw the finished car, the rumor mill had settled on 900 horsepower for Dodge’s drag-strip Challenger. The truth turned out stranger: three separate power ratings, two ignition keys, and one very specific grade of gasoline standing between the driver and the full number. Only about 3,300 were ever built. Read on for what the speculation got wrong, and why the horsepower figure mattered less than the mission.
Blip the throttle on a Challenger R/T Shaker and the hood scoop visibly twitches, because it is bolted to the engine rather than the body. Dodge borrowed that trick straight from the 1970 Challenger R/T. The 2014 package cost around 5,000 dollars, added almost nothing on paper, and buyers kept ordering it anyway. Here is what came with it, and why the manual cars are the ones collectors now watch.
American Motors built the Ambassador as its flagship for eighteen model years, and 1966 was the year the gamble finally paid off, with sales climbing to roughly 71,000 from under 19,000 just two years earlier. The DPL hardtop sat at the very top of that range with reclining buckets and AMC’s largest V8. Here is why an unrestored survivor from a brand this overlooked is genuinely harder to find than a big-name muscle car.
Gunther and Maggie Buerman turned a private collection into New England’s largest auto museum, housed in a 114,000-square-foot former missile plant in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Since opening in June 2017, the Newport Car Museum has grouped more than 75 cars into six themed galleries spanning Corvettes, Shelbys, fin-era cruisers, and American muscle. What started as one couple deciding not to keep their cars locked away became a destination built to feel like an art gallery as much as a garage.
Plymouth built 686 GTX convertibles for 1967, and only 17 of them carried the 426 Street Hemi, split roughly fifteen automatics to two four-speeds. The $564 option brought a NASCAR-derived engine, a Dana 60 or heavy-duty 8.75 rear axle, and a maintenance schedule most owners underestimated badly. Nine out of ten GTX buyers took the 375-horsepower 440 instead, and most of them were making the right call. Read on for what a genuine Hemi GTX convertible has to prove on paper.
A 1957 Ford Custom 300 called 700 Proof wears a moonshine-runner theme on the outside and a supercharged modern Ford V8 underneath, and the name is a dyno number, not a joke. Almost nothing about the build is what it appears to be at a glance, from the hood scoop to the wheels to the head design bolted under the blower. Read on to find out what is actually hiding under that plain-looking paint.
Calling this an awesome Chevy truck undersells what actually changed underneath it. 1965 was the year Chevrolet quietly rewrote the rulebook for its half-ton line, adding a 327 V8 to the C10 order sheet and offering factory in-dash air conditioning on a vehicle otherwise fitted with a vinyl bench and a column shifter. None of it shows in the sheetmetal. Here is what separates a 1965 short wide bed from the trucks that came just before it.
This replica sounds fantastic, but the original 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder it’s copying has a story darker than any muscle car legend. James Dean owned his for nine days before it killed him, and the wreckage that survived went missing decades ago despite a standing million-dollar reward. Here’s the real history behind the car everyone still calls ‘Little Bastard.’
Jay Leno’s garage holds hundreds of cars, but only a handful made the cut when The Drive asked him to name his American muscle favorites. The list runs from an expected numbers-matching Hemi Challenger to a reworked Oldsmobile Toronado throwing over 1,000 horsepower at its rear wheels — proof that even a career car collector’s favorites can still surprise.
A four-cylinder Mustang sounds like a contradiction, but Ford’s 2.3-liter EcoBoost makes more torque than the V6 it replaced, delivers it 1,600 rpm sooner, and returns 32 mpg on the highway. It also takes weight off the nose and responds to tuning in ways a naturally aspirated engine never could. The compromise is the noise, and it is a real one. Read on for why Ford already tried this once in 1984.
The Challenger SRT Demon’s launch procedure reads like a checklist from a flight manual: line lock, brake, burnout, stage, release. Behind it sits a system that builds boost before the car moves, a set of factory drag radials, and an air conditioning circuit repurposed to chill intake air. The front wheels leave the ground by nearly three feet. Read on for how Dodge got there, and what the car is like the rest of the time.