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Ford’s own sales team projected 100,000 first-year Mustang sales in 1964 and watched the company blow past that in a matter of months, built on nothing more exotic than a reskinned Ford Falcon platform. That runaway success created the entire ‘pony car’ category and gave the Mustang a silhouette so recognizable it still survives even in the strangest joke mashup builds. Read on to find out why this shape refuses to disappear no matter what gets welded onto it.
Housed at Chicago’s Klairmont Kollections museum, this 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz convertible has been called the most photographed rear end in automotive history thanks to its towering tail fins. The car also came loaded with factory air conditioning, power vent windows, and cruise control — features far ahead of their time. Commenters even tracked down its exact paint code. Watch to see why fans still call it the greatest Caddy ever built.
Ford built roughly 21,000 two-seat Thunderbirds for 1957, and only a couple hundred of them left the factory with the supercharged F-code 312. This one is not that car. It is a hand-built tribute running Mummert aluminum heads, an Edelbrock intake and triple carburetors under a pearl white porthole hardtop. Read on for what made the 1957 Thunderbird the best of the two-seaters and how this build chases the same idea by a different route.
What actually makes a muscle car video worth millions of views? It’s rarely the polished restoration reveal — usually it’s the raw burnout, the drag strip near-miss, or the sound of a big-block firing up for the first time in years. Here’s a look at why this kind of content keeps climbing the most-watched charts.
SRT had a naming convention for its most powerful V8s, and it involved fighter planes. Then the small team developing the Challenger SRT Demon needed something quieter, and the 840-horsepower engine ended up named after a round blue cat from a 1961 Hanna-Barbera cartoon. The name stuck through years of secret development and it is still what insiders call the engine. Read on for the story and what Benny actually became.
The Ice Cream Cruise’s annual burnout contest never plays it safe, and this entry proves it — a truck catches fire mid-pass while the on-site fire crew scrambles to keep the show going. Between tire chunks flying into the crowd and a Dodge that can’t settle on a gear, this clip has Australian and American burnout fans arguing in the comments about whose scene is wilder. Watch to see how close things got to going seriously wrong.
Six point seven four seconds at 213 miles per hour sounds like a purpose-built dragster, not a car that once wore an AMC Javelin badge. Bryant Goldstone’s 1973 Javelin set the Ultimate Iron record at Hot Rod Drag Week running a 565-cubic-inch big-block Chevrolet under twin 94-millimeter turbochargers, and it drove itself between tracks on public roads to do it. Read on to find out how a forgotten pony car ended up outrunning machines worth ten times its original sticker.
Pontiac built 697 Trans Ams for 1969, every single one of them Polar White with Tyrol Blue stripes, and only about 55 of those carried the 345-horsepower Ram Air IV V8. The car could not legally compete in the racing series it was named after, because its 400-cubic-inch engine exceeded the displacement limit. Pontiac paid the SCCA a royalty for the name anyway. Read on for how the most famous badge in Pontiac history started.
Dodge built an entire verification system just to keep its own dealers from overcharging customers on the hyped Challenger SRT Demon, requiring a notarized sales document before any order could move forward. Where a car landed in the build queue depended on numbers most buyers never think about. Read on to find out how the Demon concierge desk actually worked.
The 1966 Buick Skylark Gran Sport carried a 401-cubic-inch nailhead V8 that Buick was obliged to advertise as a 400, because GM had capped intermediate engine displacement at that figure. It made 325 horsepower and a genuinely enormous 445 lb-ft of torque, which is how the engine got its Wildcat 445 name. It also cost meaningfully more than a GTO. Read on for why Buick’s muscle car was the fastest one nobody bought.