Kiril

Vintage turquoise convertible car with its hood open, parked outdoors.

1964 AMC Rambler American 440 Convertible

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.

Classic green muscle car with racing stripes displayed indoors.

1971 Ford Boss 351 in Grabber Lime Paint

by Kiril

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.

Massive Muscle Car Burnouts!!

by Kiril

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.

A red classic convertible car performing a burnout with smoke around.

Dodge Challenger 1971 426 HEMI – INSANE BURNOUT and DONUTS!!

by Kiril

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.

A classic white muscle car parked under a clear sky.

Chevrolet Camaro 1967 RS/SS 502

by Kiril

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.

Two sports cars parked on a road with a person nearby under a cloudy sky.

1,000 HP Procharged Mustang Shelby GT350 Drag Races Corvette Z06, Goes All Out

by Kiril

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.

Dodge Challenger R/T vs Ford Mustang GT vs Chevy Camaro SS 0-60 MPH

by Kiril

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.

Classic white sedan with vintage design parked outdoors.

1964 Ford Fairlane 427 Thunderbolt

by Kiril

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.

Chevrolet Camaro 1973 – 350 5.7L V8

by Kiril

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.

Man standing next to a vintage car with racing stripes.

The Story of John Barkley and His Junior Stock 1957 Chevy

by Kiril

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.

Red Ford Mustang parked on a road with greenery in the background.

Ford Mustang Starts 2017 by Outselling Camaro, Challenger in a Slow January

by Kiril

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.

Woman kissing the front grille of a dark blue car.

Guess What! Your Ford Mustang Is A Girl Car!

by Kiril

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.

Happy dog with a funny meme about car audio quality.

When your passengers say…

by Kiril

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.

A sleek black and gray Dodge Challenger muscle car.

Dodge to Honor 80 Years of Muscle Car Heritage with Mopar ’17 Dodge Challenger

by Kiril

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.

Red sports car racing on a track with stone wall background.

2018 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 1LE Posts Blazing 7:16.04 Nurburgring Lap Time

by Kiril

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.

Posts By: Kiril