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Chevrolet rushed the first Camaro to market in 1967 purely to answer the Ford Mustang, but within two years the same shape carried the Z/28’s racing-bred 302, the L78 396 big-block, and a handful of ultra-rare COPO ZL1 427s that now bring seven-figure money at auction. Only 602 Z/28s were built in that first model year alone. Read on to find out which options actually turned an underdog into one of Detroit’s most valuable icons.
A deluxe leather interior is a nice thing to brag about, but it is not why 1972 matters in Corvette history. This was the last year for the chrome rear bumper, the removable rear window, and the vacuum-operated wiper door, and the last year the LT-1 350 appeared on the order sheet. Read on for what disappeared after 1972, what the horsepower figures actually mean, and why this model year is the quiet end of the early C3.
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 or exhaust tip and that shimmering rainbow discoloration is almost guaranteed to appear. It is not just cosmetic; it is chromium oxidizing and leaving the surface of your metal, which sets the stage for pitting corrosion later. Read on for what is really happening when stainless overheats, the vinegar, cleaner-paste, and mechanical fixes that remove it, and how to keep the rainbow from forming in the first place.
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.
James Finney has built a reputation most no-prep racers only dream about, and his win at Conquer the Concrete just added another chapter to it. Racing on bare, unprepped pavement at Thunder Valley Raceway Park outside Oklahoma City, Finney walked away with a $10,000 check on top of more than $45,000 already banked across his last three major no-prep events. What actually separates a driver who wins consistently on a surface built to punish everyone equally? Read on to find out what’s behind the streak.
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.
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.