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Before it became the most famous crime-fighting car on television, the 1955 Lincoln Futura was a $250,000 Ghia-built concept car with a double plastic canopy and a 300-horsepower V8. A decade later, George Barris pulled it out of storage and turned it into the original Batmobile. Here’s the real story behind the car everyone’s been trying to guess.
The first car ever to wear the Dodge Charger name was built to introduce America to the 426 Hemi, but the engine slated for it got pulled at the last minute to save a race team’s season. What actually powered this showcar for years was a secret hiding in plain sight. Decades later, a full restoration finally gave it the Hemi it was always supposed to have, and turned it into a seven-figure piece of Mopar history.
Most Batman fans never knew George Barris built a Batmobile purely for drag racing, powered by a blueprinted Holman & Moody 427 side-oiler and driven by ‘Wild Bill’ Shrewsberry. It ran the quarter-mile in just over 10 seconds at roughly 120 mph while touring dragstrips across North America from 1967 to 1968. Here’s the real racing story behind Batman’s other car.
Ford revived the Boss 302 name for just two model years, 2012 and 2013, building a Mustang with a carbon-fiber-plate limited-slip differential, shock absorbers adjustable with a flathead screwdriver, and an aero package borrowed directly from the Boss 302R race car. The rarer Laguna Seca edition added Recaro seats and its own suspension tuning. Read on to find out what separates the two model years at a glance.
Chevrolet’s 2018 NASCAR Cup Series entry borrowed its ZL1-inspired styling from the street car but almost nothing else, running a purpose-built racing V8 instead of the supercharged engine buyers could actually order. The switch came after the Chevrolet SS, its predecessor, was discontinued with little warning. Read on to find out what makes the Cup car’s engine so different from anything on a showroom floor.
Mike Hall listed his five-acre British Columbia property for $1.45 million in 2017 — house, shop, and more than 300 vintage cars included in one package deal. Instead of a quiet sale, the listing went viral and turned into Rust Valley Restorers, the TV show that made Hall’s ever-growing junkyard famous. Here’s how a guy who couldn’t count his own car collection ended up on television because of it.
A 1969 Corvette with the ultra-rare L88 427 — one of only 116 built — lines up against a 1972 Oldsmobile 442 W30, one of just 772 made, in a quarter-mile race between two factory options that were both deliberately underrated on paper. A former 442 owner in the comments insists his car’s true output was well beyond its listed 300 horsepower. Watch the run and the trap speeds that back him up.
A 1970 Chevelle originally built with a 396 sat outdoors in Indiana for twenty years after a work injury stalled its first restoration attempt. In 2012, a grandfather and grandson struck a deal to finish the job, eventually digging the car’s original SS wheels out from six feet of dirt in a collapsed shed. Read on to find out what powers it now.
A 1970 Dodge Challenger RT with a numbers-matching 383 started its second life with a $50 bill of sale from a seller in prison and a title that was never transferred. What followed was a sixteen-year, one-stall-garage restoration that survived job changes, lost interest, and a race against a newborn’s due date. Read on to find out what’s under the hood now.
From the mid-1950s through the 1970s, street racers ruled the boulevard, the drive-in, and the local dragstrip, marking their best times in shoe polish on the windshield for the whole school to see. Crashes, license suspensions, and new laws eventually ended the era, but a surprising number of cars survived, quietly passed down to children and grandchildren who still race them today. Read on to find out where this culture actually played out.
Jay Leno had one thing left on his automotive bucket list: a ride in the Hurst Hemi Under Glass with legendary stunt driver Bob Riggle at the controls. What happened on that run turned a routine exhibition into one of the most-watched clips in Jay Leno’s Garage history, with nearly eight million views and a comment section full of people who could not believe what they had just watched. Watch the video and see for yourself.
DragTimes pits a 707-horsepower Challenger Hellcat against a Tesla Model S P100D at a StreetCarDrags.com event — the latest round in what the channel calls a rivalry that ‘won’t stop racing.’ One detail catches viewers off guard: the Tesla actually weighs more than the Hellcat, making its edge purely about how instantly electric torque arrives. Multi-angle GoPro coverage means nothing at the stripe goes unseen. Watch to see whether the V8 finally closes the gap.
Elmer Trett was the first motorcycle drag racer to break 200 miles per hour, then the first past 210, 220, and 230, setting the Top Fuel record fifteen times on bikes he built himself over a career that ran nearly thirty years. He died on September 1, 1996, at the same Indianapolis event where the 200 barrier had fallen, two weeks after a 6.06-second run that put a five-second pass within reach. Thirty years later, here is why the NHRA ranked him among its fifty greatest drivers. Read on to find out what made him so hard to catch.
A grandfather who sold used cars for 60 years, a mom who beat the neighborhood Corvette owner in a full-size Pontiac, and a dad who won a drag race at 69 — this is a family where muscle cars run three generations deep. From a Mach 1 Mustang to a Dodge Super Bee to a 2016 Mustang GT painted in a nod to Steve McQueen’s Bullitt car, the cars change but the obsession never has.
Chrysler built the 426 Hemi to win NASCAR races and had no intention of selling it to the public. A homologation rule forced the company’s hand, and for six model years a lightly civilized race engine was available over the counter to anyone who could afford the option and the insurance. Here is what made the Elephant so effective, what the 425-horsepower rating really hid, and why 1971 was the end of it.