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GM’s 1971 switch to low-lead fuel dropped the Buick 455’s compression from 10.0:1 to 8.5:1, and the Stage 1 rating fell from 360 horsepower to 345. Buick built the car anyway, with a hotter camshaft, larger valves, a recalibrated Quadrajet and 3.42 Positraction as standard, and roughly 81 of them left the factory as convertibles. Period tests still recorded mid-13-second quarter miles. Read on for what a genuine Stage 1 has to prove before you write the check.
Buick built well over a hundred thousand Special sedans for 1953, and yet this ordinary four-door quietly marked the end of an engine era nobody at the time realized was closing. A brand-new V8 was already going into more than half of Buick’s output that year, just not into this car. Here is why Buick held its most affordable model back, and what else changed underneath in the same twelve months.
Alf’s 1965 Chevy II Nova SS still wears its original California dealer plates, decades after Hovey-Dallas Chevrolet first sold it — only now it’s a familiar sight near Seaview Road outside Adelaide, Australia, following a 2008 import. The car runs its factory 283 V8 and PowerGlide transmission, kept close to stock except for dual Flowmaster mufflers and a fresh set of mags. Read on to see how a documented, three-owner Nova crossed an ocean and stayed true to its roots.
More than 800 cars packed Cobo Center for the 65th annual Detroit Autorama in 2017, one of the most significant gatherings in the hot rod and custom car world. The Ridler Award, reserved for cars debuting for the very first time in public, went to a scratch-built 1933 Ford Roadster running a 427 big block. What else was hiding among 800 cars competing for the hobby’s biggest stage?
A 1960 Chevrolet Impala convertible in Ermine White carries an engine option so rare that one longtime fan estimates only a few hundred were built this way: the 348 Tri-Power, three two-barrel carburetors feeding a car most buyers ordered with a single four-barrel instead. Volo Auto Museum’s Brian Grams walks through this loaded survivor with My Car Story host Lou Costabile, and the story it tells — from Sydney to a car show price tag decades later — says a lot about how these cars are valued today. Watch to see what made this one worth keeping.
Somewhere in America sits a single 1965 Chevelle convertible that Chevrolet built completely differently from every other Malibu on the lot, and for decades most people who saw it had no idea why. Chevy had a new big-block ready to show off and, rather than quietly bolt it into a few cars, engineers built an entire limited package around it. Only 201 were made, and fewer than eighty are believed to survive.
Yenko cars from this era mean one thing to most collectors: a big-block shoehorned into something that had no business being that quick. Then the 1970 Nova wearing Yenko badges broke the pattern completely. Don Yenko had built his entire reputation on 427-powered COPO monsters, and for 1970 he skipped the big-block altogether. The reason had less to do with engineering than with insurance underwriters.
A black 1972 Monte Carlo does not announce itself the way a Chevelle SS does, and that was entirely the point. Chevrolet built this car to compete in the personal luxury coupe boom, not to win stoplight races. Yet a genuine 454 big-block sat on the order sheet that year, listed alongside power windows and a padded vinyl roof, and 1972 turned out to be the final year of the original car’s styling.
By 1973 the Camaro Z28 had lost its solid lifters, its high compression, and its Holley carburetor, and it was rated at 245 net horsepower. It also gained air conditioning availability and kept one of the best chassis of any American car of the era. It was the last Z28 before the 1974 bumper regulations changed the shape for good. Read on for what was really left inside the badge.
Chevrolet spent most of 1964 insisting it did not need a Mustang rival, then spent the next two years building one in a hurry. The 1967 Camaro arrived on an all-new F-body platform with everything from a 140-horsepower six to a 375-horsepower 396, plus a homologation special called the Z/28 that only 602 buyers ever received. Here is what made the first year the one collectors still chase hardest.
Plymouth built 108 Hemi ‘Cuda hardtops for 1971 and just eleven convertibles, which is why this specific corner of the Mopar market operates on a completely different scale from everything around it. The car in question has covered 2,010 miles since new and was custom-ordered with the desirable boxes already ticked. Whether that adds up to a seven-figure asking price depends less on rarity than on paperwork. Here is what actually drives the numbers.
A nicely restored 1979 Ford F150 4×4 with the 351 V8 sits in a smaller corner of the market than most people assume, because the four-wheel-drive V8 combination was never the volume seller. This was the last year of an entire F-Series generation, riding on a front suspension design Ford had already trusted for fourteen years. Read on to find out why that suspension stuck around so long and what makes this configuration worth seeking out.
By 1965 Chevrolet had already solved the question of how to make a Corvette go fast. The harder problem was stopping it, and the four-wheel disc brakes that arrived that year were so far beyond the drums they replaced that Chevrolet offered buyers a cash credit to refuse them. Almost nobody took it. Then, in March, a 396 big block appeared on the order sheet and changed the conversation entirely. Here is what made 1965 the pivotal Sting Ray year.
A one-minute trailer for Fate of the Furious sent shockwaves through the muscle car community in December 2016 — buried in the fast cuts was a widebody Dodge Challenger nobody had officially seen before, wearing a Hellcat-inspired face months ahead of its real reveal. Fans also spotted a modified Charger and a widebody Plymouth GTX sharing the frame with a Lamborghini and a Subaru WRX STI. Read on to find out what Dodge was quietly teasing before it was ready to talk about it.
Sweden’s underground street racing scene has thrived for decades thanks to a legal quirk that makes catching drivers in the act nearly impossible. Big-block, nitrous-fed American muscle cars including Camaros and Monte Carlos routinely run quarter-mile passes in the 9-second range at over 1,000 horsepower on public roads. The Stockholm Open, tracing its roots to 1982, turns this underground culture into an annual spectacle.