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The 1966 Ford Galaxie is one of the most underrated classics of the era, and the engine list explains why: it ran from a 150-horsepower inline six all the way to a 425-horsepower 427, with the brand-new 428 and the one-year-only 7-Litre model sitting in between. Underneath was a coil-sprung rear suspension most competitors did not offer. Read on for what separated the mild versions from the genuinely fast ones.
This 1951 Ford coupe hides a 368 cubic-inch Y-block V8 pulled from a mid-1950s Lincoln, an engine that had no factory business anywhere near a Shoebox. The car left the line with a 226 inline six or a 239 flathead V8, neither of which could keep up with the shape. Here is why builders have raided Lincoln’s parts bin for decades, what separates the Lincoln Y-block from the small Ford engine sharing its name, and which details are hardest to execute.
The 25th Raleigh Classic Car Auction filled two exhibition halls at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds with decades of automotive history, from unrestored survivors to numbers-matching classics. What began as a modest sale has grown into a twice-yearly tradition for collectors chasing originality over modification. Indoors, under controlled lighting, cars that rarely surface elsewhere finally cross the block. See what drew bidders back for a milestone 25th event.
The Bugatti Chiron’s speedometer reads to 310 mph, but the car is electronically limited to 261, and the reason is not the engine. It is the tires, which are asked to survive forces that required a test facility originally built for space shuttle rubber. Read on for what actually happens to a tire at those speeds, why the limiter exists, and what happened when Bugatti finally took it off.
About 1,500 muscle cars, hot rods, and customs rolled through Galesburg, Illinois on a Tuesday morning in June 2017 as HOT ROD Power Tour passed through on the leg from Davenport to Champaign, briefly bringing the town’s old cruising strip back to life. A railroad city known for Carl Sandburg and Knox College, and not a Route 66 town despite common assumptions, got a morning of Detroit iron instead. Read on to find out why the moment meant so much to the people on the curb.
A reader-submitted photo caught this Dodge Challenger SRT Demon prototype resting in a Colorado parking lot months before its official reveal — an early look at what would become the quickest production car ever built at the time, one so extreme the NHRA banned it from sanctioned events. Read on to find out what was hiding under that camouflage.
In January 2017, Ford promised a hybrid Mustang with more low-end torque than the standard V8, backed by a canceled $1.6 billion Mexican plant and $700 million in Flat Rock upgrades. The 2020 target came and went without the car ever showing up. Read on for where that money and engineering effort actually went, and why Ford’s CEO says the idea isn’t dead yet.
Put forty-four model years between two Corvettes and the argument stops being a matter of taste and becomes a physics lesson. The 1963 Sting Ray introduced independent rear suspension to America’s sports car and wore a split rear window Chevrolet killed after a single season. The 2007 Z06 ran a dry-sump 427 small block that could out-brake and out-corner cars costing three times as much. Read on to find out which questions each one was actually built to answer.
TFLcar’s host describes experiencing actual tunnel vision behind the wheel of Dodge’s supercharged Challenger Demon during this quarter-mile pass — a sensation more associated with fighter pilots than car reviewers. Viewers zeroed in on the launch, the smoking rear tires, and even a spoiler that lifts at the finish to help slow the car down. One commenter called it simply the baddest, fastest car ever built. Watch the launch that caused it.
Australia built its own answer to the muscle car wars, and the sharpest weapon it produced was a six-cylinder. The 1972 Chrysler Valiant Charger R/T E49 ran a 265-cubic-inch Hemi-six with triple 45mm Webers, a shot-peened crank and tuned-length headers, and Wheels magazine named it the fastest-accelerating car built in Australia that year. Only 149 were made. Read on to find out how a straight-six embarrassed V8s twice its displacement.
Mark Weddle’s 1968 Camaro answers to “The Janitor,” and the nickname describes what happens to the field rather than any modesty on his part. The car has been rebuilt from a small-block-and-nitrous combination to a Torrez Performance 406 running a single Precision 106mm turbocharger, chasing consistent 5.40-second eighth-mile passes on no-prep surfaces. Here is why the turbo conversion mattered more than the horsepower number, and what a swap like that actually costs beyond the turbo itself.
Nobody can agree on the exact specs of any single General Lee because The Dukes of Hazzard chewed through somewhere between 200 and 300 Dodge Chargers over its 1979-to-1985 run, with only about 18 surviving in driveable condition. Stunt coordinator Al Wyatt Sr. built the fleet around lessons learned from an earlier film, and the welded-shut doors that became the character’s signature trait were pure structural necessity. Read on to find out why a genuine survivor is rarer than winning a drag race.
Plymouth built exactly five 1971 ‘Cuda 440 Six Barrel convertibles with a four-speed. Not five hundred, five. That number is the result of a perfect storm: a top-tier engine option, the rarest body style, the least popular transmission choice, and a model year in which the entire muscle car market collapsed underneath it. Read on for how a car this specific ever got built and why 1971 is the most consequential year in E-body history.
The old-vs-new muscle car debate is not really about horsepower numbers — those were settled on paper decades ago. It is about whether a mechanical, feedback-heavy driving experience means more than a modern car’s warranty-backed, traction-controlled speed. Both sides have a real case, which is exactly why the argument refuses to die at every stoplight where the two eras meet.
A stock 1970 Chevelle rolling into a SEMA hall would not turn a single head anymore, which is exactly the problem this pro-touring build was created to solve. Roughly 180 shop-built vehicles enter Battle of the Builders each year, and judges narrow that field to twelve finalists competing against trucks, off-roaders, and imports. Getting there means the sheet metal has to look untouched while nearly everything beneath it is replaced. Read on to find out what that actually takes.