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The Dodge Challenger SRT Demon arrived at the 2017 New York Auto Show with 840 horsepower, a certified 9.65-second quarter mile at 140 mph, and a Guinness record for lifting its front wheels off the line, and a portion of the internet still called it a letdown because rumors had promised four digits. Hennessey promised to fix it. What the shop actually built first was a Camaro. Here is how that detour played out, and the asterisk attached to that 840 figure.
A free monthly parking-lot meetup has quietly become the largest car gathering in the entire state of Oklahoma. See how Coffee and Cars OKC grew from a simple Saturday morning tradition into a genuine charity fundraiser. This particular meet carried extra weight, tied to the Oklahoma City Auto Show’s 100th anniversary.
Weld a stainless steel panel and that shimmering rainbow discoloration is almost guaranteed to show up. It’s not just cosmetic, it’s chromium leaving the surface of your metal. Professor Hammer breaks down what’s really happening when stainless overheats, and the simple chemical and mechanical fixes that stop it from becoming a corrosion problem down the road.
Somebody built a 1960 Chevrolet Corvette that looks as though it drove out of a horror film, and gave it a name to match. Revenant appeared at the 2016 Detroit Autorama wearing pale silver paint laced with deep violet-maroon, hiding a crate LS7 427, a six-speed manual, a fully custom tube chassis, and rear bodywork widened three inches. The body is nearly all that survived. Read on to find out what it took to build.
Megalodon is a 1969 Camaro named after a sixty-foot prehistoric shark, built alone by Virginia’s Brent Austin in a home garage over roughly a year. Under the shark-silver paint sits a 565 cubic-inch big block with an F3R ProCharger, 800 lb/hr injectors, and a TH400, in a combination Austin estimates is worth around 2,000 horsepower. Here is why a one-man build keeps outdrawing full shop cars at No Prep Mayhem, and what the setup choices reveal.
This full-size cruiser got a near-total redesign for 1960, sharing only its roof and trunk lid with the previous year’s model. Buick built it around a 364 cubic inch V8 offered in three different tunes, topping out at 300 horsepower with the four-barrel Power Pack option. More than 150,000 rolled off the line that year alone. Did you guess the year, make, and model?
Mike and Jim Ring build cars for clients who can afford anything, unveil them to enormous crowds in Las Vegas every November, and then drive home to a Wisconsin town of fewer than two thousand people. The gap between those two facts is the most interesting thing about Ringbrothers. Read on for how a small-town body shop became one of the most recognizable names in the restomod world without ever moving.
Chevrolet had less than a year to answer the Ford Mustang, and the car it rushed into showrooms for 1967 has now outlived the emergency that created it by nearly six decades. The first Camaro arrived with eight engines, two very different option packages, and a hidden-headlight trick that most buyers wanted more than they wanted stripes. Here is how a panic response became an icon almost overnight.
No-prep drag racing strips away the sticky track surface most cars depend on for grip, turning every run into a battle against wheelspin on bare concrete. At the Conquer the Concrete event at Thunder Valley Raceway Park near Oklahoma City, James ‘Birdman’ Finney turned that chaos into a $10,000 payday. It capped a run that had already put more than $45,000 in his pocket across his previous three major no-prep races.
Dropping a modern five- or six-speed into a classic muscle car sounds like a weekend job right up until the transmission is on the jack and the tunnel says no. Tremec’s TKO, TKX, and T-56 Magnum each solve a different set of problems, and choosing wrong costs far more than the gearbox itself. Read on for what actually determines whether a Tremec fits your car, and what the swap really costs once the parts list is honest.
While Pontiac was inventing the muscle car with the 1964 GTO, Dodge was building the opposite: a Dart GT convertible with a 225 Slant Six, a pushbutton automatic, and fuel economy nobody advertised. It was not fast, and it was never meant to be. Read on for why the Slant Six Dart may have been the smarter buy in 1964 and why these cars are quietly becoming collectible on their own terms.
Line up a supercharged Shelby GT500 against a naturally aspirated Camaro SS and the spec sheet declares a winner before anyone stages. Then the tree drops, and the spec sheet turns out to have been describing two entirely different cars aimed at two entirely different buyers. Traction, launch technique, and driver nerve routinely rewrite the math. Here is why this matchup keeps getting rematched, and why the outcome is less predictable than it looks.
Chevrolet did not build the Z/28 to win a stoplight argument. It built it to satisfy a rulebook that capped racing engines at 5.0 liters, which is why engineers invented an entirely new 302 small block by mixing parts from two others. The 1968 car sharpened the formula with better suspension, a homologated cross-ram induction package, and back-to-back Trans-Am titles. Read on for what made the plainest-looking Camaro the most respected one.
Chevrolet built more SS 396 Chevelles in 1969 than in any other year of the option’s run, more than 86,000 of them, and yet keeping one genuinely big-block powered five decades later is its own kind of stubbornness. Jerry McLean named his build Rats Forever, and anyone who knows what a rat motor is already understands the entire philosophy. Here is what that commitment actually costs, and why the community respects it.
Chris Slee emigrated from New Zealand with more ambition than money and opened Kiwi Classics and Customs in a small Franklin, Tennessee shop. His problem was the one every new builder has: no customers and no proof. The answer was a big-block 1966 Mustang, a swap Ford itself did not attempt until it redesigned the car for 1967. Read on for why that engine choice was the entire business plan.