 |
Chevrolet had two versions of a new 454 big-block ready for the 1970 Corvette, and the wilder one was advertised at 460 horsepower. It never reached a single retail buyer — a labor strike had already shortened the model year and the LS7 was deleted from the order sheet, leaving the 390-horsepower LS5 as the only 454 anyone could actually order. Read on to find out why a Bridgehampton Blue four-speed roadster from that year sits at such an important point in Corvette history.
Chevrolet did not simply restyle the Monte Carlo for 1973 — it rebuilt the entire concept of what a GM personal luxury coupe should be, and buyers responded with 290,693 sales and a Motor Trend Car of the Year trophy. Opera windows, a 116-inch A-body chassis and an optional 454 big-block all arrived at once. Read on to find out why an honest survivor from that record year is rarer than the production numbers suggest.
Adding a hundred horsepower to most muscle cars means a shopping list: bigger brakes, stiffer springs, wider tires, a stronger differential. The sixth-generation Camaro SS largely shrugs that process off, thanks to a GM Alpha platform shared with Cadillac and a significant weight reduction over the car it replaced. Bolt on a supercharger and the LT1’s 455 horsepower climbs into ZL1 territory. Read on for what the chassis handles on its own, and what it genuinely does not.
Every August, the Bonneville Salt Flats fill with streamliners, lakesters, and vintage muscle cars chasing a record that could vanish within a year. Speed Week traces back to 1937, when a handful of Southern California car clubs founded the SCTA to bring order to dry-lake racing. By 2017’s 69th running, it had become something rarer: a motorsport with no purse, no crowd, and nothing to prove except how fast you really are.
The 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon made 808 horsepower on pump gas and 840 on race fuel, ran a certified 9.65-second quarter mile, and lifted its front wheels hard enough to earn a Guinness record. It also arrived with a steel crate of drag parts, a factory transbrake, and an air conditioner repurposed to chill the intake charge. Dodge built it for a single model year and then walked away. Read on for what it actually took to get there.
Supercharged Hondas built their own version of muscle car bragging rights, small displacement, big numbers, and years of tuners proving the doubters wrong. This piece looks at how VTEC-era four-cylinders became a forced-induction platform, and how a two-liter engine eventually chased down horsepower figures nobody thought were possible from an economy-car engine.
In 1980 Pontiac answered the death of the big-block by bolting a turbocharger to a 4.9-liter V8, badging it as the Indianapolis 500 Pace Car, and daring buyers to take it seriously. Only 5,700 Special Edition Turbo Trans Ams were built, every one with T-tops, Cameo White paint and a boost gauge sitting on the hood. Read on to find out why a car once dismissed as a malaise-era compromise is quietly climbing in value.
Dodge spent most of 2017 selling a car nobody had actually seen, teasing the 2018 Challenger SRT Demon one cryptic clip at a time while the internet invented numbers to fill the silence. What finally rolled onto the New York auto show stage carried 840 horsepower, a transbrake, and a front-tire trick no production car had ever managed. Only 3,300 were built for the United States. Read on for what Dodge actually engineered into it.
Ask ten people to define a muscle car and half of them will describe a pony car instead. Both classes were born in 1964, from opposite ends of Detroit’s thinking: one a mid-size sedan stuffed with an oversized V8, the other a compact built to sell style first and horsepower second. Sixty years of overlapping marketing have blurred the line badly, and the distinction still moves real money at auction. Read on for where the dividing line actually sits.
Manufacturers do not normally sell cars on drag radials, but the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon arrived with 315/40R18 units developed specifically for it, each measuring 12.6 inches wide. The result was a 15 percent larger contact patch and more than double the grip of a standard Hellcat. Read on for why the tires, not the 840 horsepower, were the component that made every one of the Demon’s numbers possible.
In 1961 an American designer decided a Corvette was not European enough, so he shipped one to Turin and had Vignale build a new body over it by hand. The result headlined the Paris Salon and landed on magazine covers, and underneath the Italian coachwork it is still fundamentally a C1 Corvette. Here is how the Kelly Corvette came to exist, and why the American-chassis, Italian-body formula was more common than you would think.
Pontiac built the first Firebird in barely six months after General Motors killed its pitch for a genuine two-seat sports car, borrowing GTO taillights and a shared Camaro platform to hit showrooms by February 1967. Four completely different engines, from a mild inline-six to a 400-cubic-inch V8 pulled from the GTO, all wore the same sheet metal, and only 697 of the ultra-rare 1969 Trans Am package were ever built. Read on to find out which engines actually made this car a legend.
Most show cars arrive on a trailer. This 1971 Camaro street machine drove 275 miles under its own power to reach the show field, with an LS swap under a hood that was never meant to hide it. Chevrolet built 114,630 Camaros that year, and only 4,862 of them were Z/28s. Read on to find out why a strike at the Norwood plant made 1971 the second-generation F-body’s real first year.
Every month, without fail, a market square in central Helsinki fills with American muscle cars, classics, hot rods, and the occasional Japanese oddball — all gathered for a meet that has nothing to do with Detroit, SEMA, or any American car culture hub. This Jamboolio video captures the September 2017 Cruising Night at its liveliest, from a 1967 Mustang commenters called “perfect” to a Death Proof-inspired Nova prowling the crowd. It’s proof that the sound of a V8 translates in any language. Watch to see what shows up next.
A 1,500-horsepower turbocharged Foxbody Mustang known as the Dragonfly squares off against a Supra with real Street Outlaws pedigree, and the pass turns into something nobody in the stands expected: over 200 feet of controlled power wheelie down the center of the track. Built to run 7-second passes and still be driven home afterward, Dwayne’s small-tire Mustang put on a display of car control that comment sections are still talking about. Watch how close this one actually got.