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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.
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.
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.