 |
The 1978 Porsche 930 Turbo picked up a nickname that owners still repeat with a nervous half-laugh, and it had nothing to do with how fast the car was in a straight line. A 3.3-liter intercooled flat-six, a single turbocharger with no manners, four gears, and most of the weight behind the rear axle added up to something no other car of the era could replicate. Read on to find out what made it so feared, and why collectors chase it anyway.
Ford’s new mid-size Torino paced the 1968 Indianapolis 500, carried David Pearson to a NASCAR championship, and won Motor Trend’s Car of the Year award, all in its debut season. The GT fastback was the shape that did most of that work, and by spring Ford had a 428 Cobra Jet to put under its hood. Read on for what the 1968 Torino GT actually offered and why the fastback is the one collectors chase.
The U-2 spy plane cannot land without a car racing alongside it on the runway, radioing the pilot’s altitude down to the final foot — and for decades, that job went to genuine muscle cars pulled into government service. This clip captures the aircraft’s dramatic departure from RAF Fairford, with the very vehicle waiting for its return parked just out of frame. Watch to see what the Air Force trusts with landing a Cold War-era spy plane today.
Mercury spent 1967 proving that a plusher, quieter Mustang could sell, then spent 1968 arming it with everything from a 230-horsepower 302 four-barrel to a 390-horsepower 427. This particular 1968 Cougar takes a different route entirely, pairing a worked-over small block with Vintage Air, Hooker headers and polished American Racing wheels. Read on to find out where it fits in the most underrated pony car lineup Ford Motor Company ever built.
Chevrolet built only 7,015 Nova SS models in 1971, a number small enough that finding one at a cruise night is closer to luck than expectation. That scarcity was not a marketing decision. It was what happened when insurance surcharges, emissions rules, and a new low-lead fuel mandate arrived at the same moment. This custom yellow 350 build shows what the platform still had left to give once the factory stopped pushing.
A 1967 Mustang Fastback with a dyno-verified 370-horsepower 302 sounds like a straightforward resto-mod until you realize Ford did not build a 302 until 1968. That single detail explains the entire philosophy behind this build, and it raises the question every resto-mod eventually has to answer: at what point does a modernized classic stop being the car it started as? Here is what the 1967 Fastback platform gives a builder, and what it asks in return.
Ford spent five decades selling the Mustang on noise, torque, and attitude, then quietly engineered in independent rear suspension, magnetic dampers, and an exhaust system with a mode designed to avoid annoying the neighbors. The result was a better car in almost every measurable way, and it started an argument that has not ended. Read on for what changed, why it changed, and what Ford refused to give up.
Every muscle car crowd loves a good debate, and Hot or Not photo posts like this one never fail to deliver. With no year, make, or model attached, this glossy red classic has to win or lose the argument purely on looks: stance, color, chrome, and proportion. It is a reminder that the communitys eye for what counts as a genuine head-turner is anything but universal.
There was a moment when you could count every new performance car sold with a naturally aspirated V8 on your fingers, and the list was already shrinking fast. Turbochargers had claimed nearly everything else, and the reasons had far more to do with regulation than with engineering preference. Read on for which engines held the line, why they mattered, and what is actually left for a buyer who wants displacement instead of boost.
Plymouth expected to sell about 20,000 Road Runners in 1968 and moved more than twice that, building a muscle car around the radical idea of removing everything a buyer did not need. Fewer than one in forty buyers paid the $714 premium for the 426 Hemi, which cost roughly a quarter of the car’s base price. This restored blue example carries that exact rare combination. Read on for why the cheapest Mopar got the most expensive engine.
BMW’s 8-Series Concept revived a nameplate that vanished from showrooms for nearly two decades after the original E31 coupe was discontinued in 1999. Debuted at the exclusive Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este rather than a traditional auto show, the concept previewed a production coupe arriving in 2018 with a lineup topped by a twin-turbo V12. Its low hood, sweeping roofline, and 21-inch wheels signaled BMW’s intent to reclaim flagship coupe territory it had quietly ceded years earlier.
Building one movie car is expensive. Building six identical copies of the same car on purpose is a decision only a production with a serious stunt budget makes. That is exactly what happened with the widebody 1968 Dodge Charger built for The Fate of the Furious, a machine designed to cross frozen Icelandic lakes on tires packed with more than a thousand metal spikes each. Almost nothing underneath it was a Charger.
Most retellings of the muscle car’s decline stop at the 1980s comeback, but the real numbers behind the collapse, and the technology that eventually revived it decades later, tell a far more dramatic story. Here’s what actually happened between the insurance crisis of the 1970s and the 700-horsepower factory cars of today.
Ford sold the 1969 Mustang Mach 1 with a 428 Cobra Jet rated at 335 horsepower, a number almost nobody in the industry believed at the time and almost nobody believes now. The real figure was closer to 410, and the gap was not an accounting error. It was a deliberate move aimed squarely at insurance underwriters. Here is what that decision actually bought Mach 1 buyers, and why it still matters to collectors.
Seventeen. That is the entire population of one specific 1970 Plymouth ‘Cuda configuration, and it is not the one most people would guess. Ask a room full of Mopar fans to name the rarest droptop of that year and the answer comes back Hemi every time, which is correct on price and wrong on this particular question. The 440 Six-Barrel convertible with a heavy-duty four-speed is rarer than its automatic sibling and cost far less than any Hemi ever did. Read on for why so few buyers checked both boxes.