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Ralph Carungi calls his 1958 Gaylord Gladiator “The Batmobile in the Tuxedo,” a line Lou Costabile first heard at an invitation-only concours limited to 90 cars, and couldn’t forget. This is believed to be the first video ever made of the car, which Ralph considers a true one-of-one. But one commenter, who worked for designer Brooks Stevens, insists a second example was built and stolen off a European dock decades ago. So which story is true?
A red Plymouth Belvedere and a silver Pontiac Grand Prix sit side by side in this 1965 photo, representing two completely different ideas of what a great car should be that year. This piece breaks down the wedge V8 hiding under the Belvedere’s plain sheet metal, the restyled Grand Prix’s bid for personal-luxury prestige, and how rare and valuable each has become today.
This 1973 Ford Mustang Mach 1 sits at an overlooked hinge point in Mustang history – the final year of the original first-generation pony car before Ford downsized into the Mustang II. Watch This Car’s short walkaround doesn’t dig into VIN-level history, so the comments end up doing some of the work instead, including a Polish viewer inviting the channel to see a better-documented Mach 1 near Malbork. It’s a small, quietly significant survivor most muscle car fans skip right past. Watch to see why it shouldn’t be overlooked.
A supercharged big block pushed past 700 horsepower on pump gas, custom suspension, and a nine-inch Ford differential under a 1967 Chevelle Super Sport. The factory version of this car was capped by a General Motors corporate memo that actually reduced its advertised horsepower that year, and the legendary 375-horsepower L78 was not even on the order sheet. Read on to find out how the badge and the build connect.
The 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon did not simply add horsepower to the Hellcat formula. It brought a factory transbrake, a system that built boost while the car stood still, an air conditioning circuit repurposed to chill the intake charge, and drag radials on all four corners. Read on for how each of those pieces worked, what the car actually recorded at the strip, and why no manufacturer has attempted anything like it since.
Chevrolet’s sales brochures never mentioned it, but knowledgeable buyers could order a genuine big-block V8 into this compact coupe simply by asking. The shared chassis with the Camaro made it possible, and the numbers that resulted still hold up decades later. Here is the story behind the option Chevy never bothered to advertise.
Two cars, three decades apart, both built around the same unusual idea: a high-performance engine wrapped in a body shaped for hauling people and cargo, not chasing lap times. One is a full-size American wagon with a glass-topped rear cabin. The other is a V12 shooting-brake from Maranello that sends power to all four wheels. Which one actually deserves the garage space?
A car with FIA papers and decades of magazine coverage does not get built for weekend cruising — it gets built to win, or at least to survive trying. This 1968 Camaro carries both, along with a documented history fighting for points in one of the toughest touring car series Britain ever ran against cars a fraction of its size.
For a brief window the 707-horsepower Challenger SRT Hellcat was the most powerful muscle car ever sold, and then Dodge announced something that made it the second most powerful car in its own showroom. Living with that demotion turned out to reveal more about the Hellcat than its spec sheet ever did. Read on for what the car actually was, what it ran, and why it may be the better long-term buy of the two.
Two nearly identical turbocharged Mustangs, two well-known names from the online street racing scene, and a Houston backstreet that had hosted plenty of grudge matches before this one. Chris Hamilton’s BoostedGT went up against a car nicknamed Black Jesus in a race that came down to a margin thin enough to guarantee a rematch.
This 1964 AMC Rambler American 440 convertible has a name that confuses everyone who hears it – “440” refers to AMC’s top trim level, not a big-block V8, and even longtime commenters can’t agree on which of AMC’s inline sixes is actually under the hood. samspace81’s quick road test walks through a car built during Rambler’s commercial peak, right as the muscle car era it never joined was just getting started. Former Rambler owners fill the comments with their own stories. Watch to see what made this quiet compact worth remembering.
The LeSabre name did not start as a car. It started as a jet-inspired 1951 GM Motorama show piece so popular that General Motors kept displaying it for years. By 1960 it was Buick’s entry-level full-size line, and the convertible is the version worth remembering, with returning VentiPorts, a brand-new Tri-Shield badge, and a 364 V8 that could be ordered to run on regular gas. Read on for what made 1960 a turning point for Buick.
Ford built the Boss 351 for exactly one model year, 1971, to homologate a racing program it had already walked away from. Fewer than two thousand left the factory before the entire Boss nameplate was retired. Underneath the wider, heavier restyled Mustang sat a 351 Cleveland assembled from a parts-counter wish list, and in Grabber Lime it announced itself from a block away. Here is what the engineers managed to push through, and why the car is still undervalued.
Burnouts look like pure chaos, but the smoke show hides a surprising amount of engineering logic underneath it. The maneuver started as a practical fix for a specific starting-line problem drag racers kept running into, decades before it became a backyard and social-media spectacle. Here’s how it went from a track necessity to one of muscle car culture’s defining rituals.
Dodge built exactly 71 Hemi Challengers for 1971, the engine’s final year, and not one of them was a convertible. That makes this smoky, 426-powered droptop a build rather than a survivor, assembled by someone who decided the combination should have existed even though the order books say it never did. Read on to find out why the factory walked away from its most famous engine.