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For the Super Snake’s fiftieth anniversary, Shelby American could have printed a badge and called it a celebration. Instead the Las Vegas shop built its first factory concept car in more than a decade, and pointed a nameplate famous for quarter-mile bragging rights squarely at road courses. Read on to find out what changed underneath, and why the width mattered more than the horsepower.
Pontiac released the first Trans Am in March 1969 as a barely advertised option package, using a name it had to license from the SCCA because it did not own it. Total first-year production came to just 697 cars: 689 coupes and 8 convertibles, every single one finished in Cameo White with Tyrol Blue stripes. Of those, 520 were Ram Air III four-speed coupes like this one. Read on for how a rushed, quiet launch became one of the most famous nameplates in American car history.
Pontiac named its most famous option package after a punchline from a late-sixties sketch comedy show, and it worked well enough that the name outlived the company. Line a 1969 GTO Judge with the 366-horsepower Ram Air III against a custom 2006 GTO running a twin-turbo LS2 at roughly 750 horsepower and you have two cars wearing the same badge and chasing the same reputation by completely opposite methods. Read on to find out which approach actually holds up.
The 1967 Shelby GT500 known as Eleanor is one of the most recognizable movie cars ever built, and almost none of what people believe about it survives contact with the facts. Eleven cars wore the bodywork for the 2000 remake of Gone in 60 Seconds, and only three of them could move under their own power. Steve Stanford and Chip Foose drew the silhouette. Read on to find out how far it really sits from a genuine Shelby.
Schwartz Performance took a dented California 1969 Mustang fastback, spent roughly 1,400 hours on it, and handed the finished car away to a stranger at a Las Vegas trade show. Under the Boss-inspired paint sits a 444-horsepower Coyote Boss 302 crate engine, a fabricated G-Machine chassis, and a GT500-spec brake package. Read on to find out how a brake company ended up building one of the more serious restomods of the SEMA era.
The 55th Chicago World of Wheels packed the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center with muscle cars, customs, and hot rods for its own version of March Madness. The show traces back to a 1962 Navy Pier gathering staged by the Gas Hoppers Car Club, and it survived a fire that destroyed McCormick Place, years in exile, and a 2010 move to Rosemont. Read on to find out how an ISCA-sanctioned winter show became the marquee stop for Midwest muscle car fans.
Pikes Peak’s thin air punishes forced induction, which is why the 1969 Camaro known as Big Red traded its usual supercharged big-block for a naturally aspirated combination built just for the mountain. Another competitor drove his twin-turbo street Mustang nearly 3,600 miles round-trip simply to reach the starting line, then raced through goats and fog. Read on to see how two very different preparation strategies played out on the same 12.42-mile course.
By 1973 the Oldsmobile 442 had been reduced to an option code on a Cutlass, mostly stripes, emblems, and a stiffer suspension bolted under a body made heavier by federal bumper rules. Jeff Schwartz of Schwartz Performance took that exact car and gave it the performance Oldsmobile was no longer allowed to build, fabricating custom front bodywork while deliberately keeping the outside looking factory. The restraint is the entire point. Read on for what makes it work.
Ford did not simply facelift the Mustang for 1969. The company renamed the fastback body style entirely, stretched the car nearly four inches, gave it a one-year-only quad-headlight face, and launched four new models in a single season. Buyers could order anything from a mild six-cylinder commuter to a 428 Cobra Jet. Read on to find out what made the 1969 SportsRoof a genuine turning point rather than a running change.
A black 1973 Trans Am with its shaker hood scoop open looks the part from any angle — but underneath could be one of two completely different engines, separated by a rarity gap of roughly nineteen to one. Pontiac’s Special Projects group built the SD-455 as a genuine heavy-duty answer to tightening emissions rules, and only 252 Trans Ams ever got it. Read on to find out what separated Pontiac’s last real muscle car engine from the ordinary 455.
Registration opened for the 2017 Optima Search for the Ultimate Street Car with Danny Popp, an ASE Master Technician and GM-Certified Corvette specialist, defending three straight championships. The series scores road course, autocross, braking, acceleration, and design judging together, and Popp made history in 2011 as the first winner in a modern car, a 2006 Corvette Z06. Read on to find out what it takes to keep beating a field of classic and late-model muscle across every discipline.
The 2016 Ridler Award went to a 1939 Oldsmobile convertible called Olds Cool, built for a Texas couple by a small shop that spent years on a car most builders would never have chosen. The Model 60 was Oldsmobile’s entry-level six that year, not a glamour car, and complete examples are close to unfindable today. Here is what the Ridler actually demands, why the donor car made the build harder, and what separates a Great 8 finalist from the one that wins.
In 1968, an Oldsmobile engineer asked the Hurst team to help build something that should not have existed: a 442 with the Toronado’s front-wheel-drive powertrain packed into its nose. Exactly one was completed, and it survived in one owner’s hands for 42 years before Fred Mandrick acquired it in 2012. Read on to find out why Oldsmobile bothered building a front-drive muscle car nobody was ever supposed to buy.
This twin-turbo Coyote Mustang rolled onto the dyno at Dynoedge running a modified Hellion turbo kit, reworked specifically to shorten intercooler piping and cut turbo lag, and posted a run that pushed toward nearly 1,400 horsepower at 26 psi of boost. Commenters zeroed in on the exhaust note as much as the numbers, calling it one of the best-sounding Coyotes they’d heard on a dyno. Watch the full pull to see exactly what a shortened-piping Hellion setup can do to a factory 5.0.
At the 2015 SEMA show the Ringbrothers unveiled a 1965 Mustang fastback whose only original panels were the floors. Everything else was carbon fiber built in-house, widened four inches, and finished in a color-shifting Spy Green that earned the car its name: Espionage. Under the hood sat a supercharged 427-cubic-inch LS7 making a reported 959 horsepower, a General Motors engine in a Ford body, which was rather the point. Read on to find out why the bodywork mattered more than the horsepower figure.