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Chevrolet sold the Rally Sport and Super Sport packages separately in 1967, so a genuine RS/SS required a buyer to pay for both, and factory-correct examples are rarer than either package alone. This one keeps that foundation and swaps in 502 cubic inches of modern General Motors crate big block, an engine rated well beyond anything the factory offered. Read on to find out why builders keep making that trade.
A stock Shelby GT350 already revs to 8,250 rpm on a flat-plane crank and sounds like nothing else Ford has ever built. Add a ProCharger and push it past 1,000 horsepower, and it becomes a very different weapon, aimed squarely at the Corvette Z06 that Chevrolet engineered to beat it. Traction, not horsepower, usually decides this one. Read on for what separates these two approaches and what boosting a Voodoo V8 actually costs.
Put a Hemi badge, a bowtie, and a galloping pony on the same drag strip and the internet will argue about the results for years. Independent 0-60 testing on the Camaro SS, Mustang GT, and Challenger has produced wildly different spreads depending on trim, tires, and driver. Here’s what the numbers actually show, and what’s really under each hood.
Ford built roughly 100 Fairlane Thunderbolts for 1964 with fiberglass hoods, fenders and doors, Plexiglas windows, no heater or radio, and a trunk-mounted battery, all to get a 427 High Riser into the most favorable Super Stock bracket the rulebook allowed. The 425-horsepower rating on the paperwork fooled nobody in the sport. Gas Ronda won the Winternationals with one, and Ford lost money on every car it delivered. Read on for what separates a real Thunderbolt from a very good tribute.
That exhaust note did not come from the base engine. In 1973 Chevrolet sold two entirely different 350 cubic-inch V8s in the Camaro, separated by one option box and a hundred horsepower, and the more serious one was built with four-bolt mains and a forged crank. This was also the last year the second-generation car wore its clean chrome front end before federal bumper rules changed it. Read on for what separated the two engines.
In February 1968, a nearly unknown racer named John Barkley leaned over the fender of a dark-blue 1957 Chevy deep in the Stock Eliminator pits at Pomona, having already won his class and fought through multiple rounds of the NHRA Winternationals. Junior Stock was the most unforgiving corner of drag racing, decided by hundredths and by discipline rather than by budget. Read on to find out why his name still circulates half a century later.
For the third January in a row, the Mustang outsold both the Camaro and the Challenger — even as all three pony cars posted some of their worst monthly numbers in years. The gap between first and third widened, not narrowed, during the slump. Here’s what the January 2017 numbers actually showed, and why a soft month didn’t tell the whole story.
Car Craft brought a 1968 Chevrolet Chevelle SS396 hardtop to Irwindale dragstrip in November 1967 expecting the 375-horsepower L78 to dominate the timeslip. Writer John Raffa came away frustrated instead, and said so in print in the February 1968 issue. That contradiction, a genuinely fast car that still disappointed the man driving it, says more about muscle car era expectations than any dyno figure. Read on to find out what quarter-mile testing actually measured.
In 2016, a panel of 17 women from 14 countries named the Ford Mustang their Women’s Performance Car of the Year, with the Ford Focus RS finishing a close second. The honor pushed back on decades of man’s-car marketing built around the Mustang, while the rest of the muscle car world kept moving too — Classic Performance Products modernized vintage handling, Mopar rolled out new support for grassroots NHRA Sportsman racers, and Hellcat-themed toys sold out before Christmas. Read on for the full roundup of what was happening across the muscle car world that year.
This meme about backseat audio complaints is funny because it reflects a real problem: classic muscle car radios were never built to satisfy modern ears or modern passengers. That gap spawned an entire industry of reproduction and hidden stereo systems designed to modernize the sound without cutting into an original dashboard. Owners have been quietly solving this problem for decades, one hidden amplifier at a time.
To mark eighty years of the Mopar name, Dodge built a Challenger nobody could easily buy: 160 cars total, split evenly between two hand-applied two-tone paint schemes, based on the 485-horsepower T/A 392 and loaded with catalog performance parts. Each one carried a serialized badge and shipped with a signed original drawing of that specific car. Read on for what the anniversary edition actually included and why a parts brand built it at all.
In the summer of 2017 Chevrolet sent a 2018 Camaro ZL1 1LE around the 12.9-mile Nordschleife with a six-speed manual gearbox and production Goodyear tyres, and stopped the clock at 7:16.04. That lap beat a Ferrari 488 GTB, a Nissan GT-R and a Mercedes SLS AMG, and left only one American production car ahead of it. The margin over the automatic ZL1 was 13.56 seconds. Read on to find out what actually made the difference.
