 |
The original 1967 Shelby GT500 Super Snake was not built as a limited edition collectible, it was a tire test mule for Goodyear, stuffed with a 427 race engine borrowed from Shelby’s GT40 program. A planned run of 50 street versions never happened because buyers balked at the price, leaving just the one prototype. That same car later became the most expensive Mustang ever sold at auction.
Chevrolet’s Camaro became just the third car in history, and the first since 1955, to pace the Indianapolis 500 when it took the honor in 1967. Behind the glossy pace-car status was a stranger story: the actual race winner refused to be associated with the car at all. This 350-powered convertible carries the Festival Car designation, one of just over 100 built for VIPs during Indy’s month of May.
Dodge and Plymouth both chased the same NASCAR aero rulebook in 1969 and 1970, but they answered it in very different ways. The Charger Daytona and Plymouth Superbird share a wild winged silhouette, yet their noses, wings, and even their interiors were engineered by rival teams with different priorities. Production numbers, drag coefficients, and race results reveal which wing car actually had the edge.
By 1980, the Camaro Z/28 name still promised drag-strip aggression, but emissions rules and insurance realities had already reshaped what was under the hood. The Smoking Tire’s Matt Farah found that out firsthand behind the wheel of a restored example — 190 horsepower, a mostly stock suspension, and brakes that couldn’t quite match the styling’s bravado. Here’s how the numbers explain what he felt.
George Hansen spent fifty years chasing a car he first admired as a kid in a neighbor’s driveway — a 1962 Oldsmobile Starfire convertible named after a Cold War jet fighter. The Starfire also happened to introduce a feature now standard on nearly every performance car: the floor-mounted console shifter. Here’s the history behind the car that finally caught up with Hansen’s childhood memory.
Zombie 222 looks like a stock 1968 Mustang fastback until you realize there’s no engine note — just twin electric motors making a claimed 800 horsepower and 1,800 lb-ft of instant torque. Built by Austin’s Bloodshed Motors, it runs the quarter mile in 9.89 seconds and set a 174.2 mph record at the Texas Mile. Here’s what’s actually spinning those tires.
This 1955 Chevrolet 210 wears the same sheet metal that made Chevrolet’s Tri-Five lineup famous, but almost nothing else about it is original. A GM Performance ZZ4 crate engine, a 700R4 overdrive transmission, and a Camaro-sourced rear suspension replace what Chevrolet actually offered buyers the first time around — and the gap between the two tells you exactly how far small-block performance has come since 1955.
Dodge built the 1969 Charger Daytona to win a war NASCAR itself would later legislate out of existence. Behind its pointed nose cone and towering rear wing was a wind-tunnel-tested shape good enough to make Buddy Baker the first stock car driver to top 200 mph — and good enough that only 503 were ever built before NASCAR changed the rules. Here’s the engineering story behind the car and the season that ended it.
Duck X Productions’ Lights Out 7 turned South Georgia Motorsports Park into a proving ground for radial-tire cars pushing well past 2,000 horsepower, and the wheelstands that resulted became the stuff of drag racing legend. From the physics of exactly when a front end lifts to the underdog racer who showed up without a running car and left with a five-figure purse, the story behind the chaos is stranger than the clips alone let on.
This black-and-white Ford Mustang diecast, still sealed in its display packaging, is exactly the kind of collectible that keeps scale-model hunters busy at swap meets and hobby shops long after the full-size car left showrooms. Packaging condition, limited production runs, and factory-correct liveries can matter as much to diecast collectors as horsepower does to muscle car buyers. Someone snapped this photo and left the punchline up to you. Here’s your chance to decide what this little Mustang is thinking.
The 2017 Honda Accord Coupe EX-L V6 paired a 278-horsepower 3.5-liter V6 with a six-speed manual, a combination American manufacturers had largely abandoned in their own mainstream lineups by then. Whether or not it deserves the “muscle car” label debated in this post, its timing was unmistakable: 2017 turned out to be the final year Honda built the Accord Coupe at all, with no replacement to follow. Here’s what made this quiet ending worth noticing.
The 2018 Camaro ZL1 1LE ran the Nürburgring Nordschleife in 7:16.04, a time that beat its own sibling ZL1 by nearly fourteen seconds and left every American car behind it except a 2011 Dodge Viper ACR. That gap between them shrank to less than four seconds. A 650-horsepower supercharged V8, a six-speed manual, and Multimatic dampers built specifically for this kind of abuse made it possible. Here’s how close Chevrolet came to claiming the title outright.
Appraiser Donald Osborne, who moonlights as an opera singer, sat down with Jay Leno to settle a debate between three cars that each inspired a hit song, including the 1952 Lincoln Capri immortalized in “Hot Rod Lincoln.” Only one of those three cars turned its musical fame into real collector-market gains. Nostalgia and rarity don’t always move together, and this roundup only proves it further with dispatches from a London concours and a Chicago muscle car show. Here’s what actually separates a beloved song car from a valuable one.
This Pearl White 1967 Pontiac Firebird convertible looks factory-fresh, but the Run Rite Classics team quietly rebuilt what lives under the skin. It’s a first-year Firebird with a 400 that now runs and handles better than it did new — with every modern upgrade hidden from view. Owner-restorer Chuck Woolery walks through the details at the World of Wheels show. Watch to see how a period-correct look hides modern muscle.
The Grand National Roadster Show has been running since long before most of the cars on its floor were even conceived, and the 2017 edition packed in over a thousand entries. Among the customs and restorations, one green Dodge Dart quietly upstaged plenty of flashier iron. Here is what made that Mopar corner of the show worth a second look.