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The Hennessey Venom GT hit 270.49 mph at NASA’s old Space Shuttle runway in February 2014, a speed that should have made it the fastest production car ever built. It isn’t official: Guinness requires at least 30 units, and the small Texas shop built far fewer, on top of running in only one direction. Read on for how a 1,244-horsepower twin-turbo LSX, a 2,743-pound Lotus-based chassis, and a Ford GT gearbox produced America’s fastest car, official or not.
Ed Wheeldon, known on the drag strip as Fast Eddie, once turned down a $250,000 offer for his 1968 Dodge Dart, a genuine factory Hemi Super Stock he still races at Eddyville Dragway for a $200 appearance fee. Mopar Max Magazine later put him on its cover after the car ran a best pass of 6.501 seconds. Few six-figure Hemi drag cars still see the strip today. Find out why Wheeldon insists on keeping his in the game.
A 74-year-old retired Ford technician built a private collection of more than 200 cars on his own rural Michigan property, and now a township ordinance is forcing him to sell or scrap 20 of them every month. Ron Dauzet says the pace has turned his passion into a race against the clock, with officials checking his progress in person each month. Two years and roughly 180 cars later, he’s still not done, and not every car has gone to a buyer who wanted it.
Terry in Houston had roughly a thousand miles on a frame-off restoration of his numbers-matching 1965 Oldsmobile 442 when the floodwater arrived. The question he posted to a club page is the one every owner dreads: repair it, or take the insurance money and let it go. There is no clean answer, but there is a right order to think about it. Read on to find out what actually happens to a freshly restored classic once the water recedes.
Named after Garth Brooks’ hit about ditching pretension for good company, the Friends in Low Places Car Truck and Bike Show made it to its sixth year by keeping things simple: an open field, a mix of muscle cars, trucks, and bikes, and no velvet-rope attitude. Grassroots shows like this one rarely make headlines, but they’re often where the most honest, unrestored survivors turn up.
When Muscle Car Fan’s following crossed half a million, the site marked it with a short trailer instead of a victory lap, a quiet nod to years of owner interviews and feature stories rather than one viral moment. Reaching that scale in a niche this specific says something about how far muscle car nostalgia actually reaches beyond the collector crowd. The bigger story is not the number itself, it is what kept that many people showing up. Watch the trailer and see how it is framed.
A 1967 Shelby GT350 sat still for three decades before somebody finally turned the key and let it idle back to life. The ’67 was the year Shelby’s Mustang grew up, gained weight, and split its own fan base right down the middle. Between a factory Paxton option, a fiberglass nose nobody expected, and a production run small enough to matter today, there is more to this car than the dust on it suggests. Read on to find out why the ’67 still divides people.
Plymouth’s Road Runner nearly died in a hallway argument at Highland Park, killed off by a stylist who swore no cartoon bird would ever wear his sheet metal. The man who saved it was a product planner named Jack Smith, a former Studebaker engineer who also helped create the GTX and who died recently at 94. He never claimed the idea as his own. Read on for how a $3,000 budget bomb beat every projection Plymouth had for it.
Larry F. bought his first car in 1977 for $400: a white 1970 Pontiac GTO that broke his father’s one rule about first cars. He spent two years rebuilding it, drove it for years, and sold it in 1988 for $800 before the muscle car market took off. Years later, walking through an Illinois junkyard with his son, he found out exactly what became of it. Read on to find out what he saw.
Long before infotainment screens and built-in phones were standard equipment, one enthusiast crammed a television, a telephone, and a working mini bar into a customized 1959 El Camino and called it the Ultimus. Built by hand for a fraction of what a factory concept would cost, its gold metalflake paint and double bubble top made it one of the strangest show cars of its era. Here’s the story behind the build.
When Carroll Shelby learned Bill Cosby had been driving foreign exotics, he didn’t just object, he built a 900-horsepower Cobra Super Snake to settle the argument. CSX 3303, one of only two automatic Super Snake 427s ever made, arrived at Cosby’s front door via Shelby’s associate Barry Galloway, complete with a dash plaque guaranteeing 200 mph. Cosby drove it once around the block and handed the keys straight back. Read on to find out how a department store argument turned into one of the strangest deliveries in Shelby history.
Steve McQueen did much of his own driving in the Bullitt chase scene — a 1968 Ford Mustang GT pursuing a Dodge Charger through San Francisco with no CGI and famously little music. Decades later, fans are still finding new details: a recurring green VW Bug, impossible geography between shots, and a scene that Mopar owners and Mustang fans both claim as their own. Watch the chase that’s still the benchmark everyone else gets measured against.
The 1957 Plymouth Fury’s dual-quad 318 was Plymouth’s only true factory high-performance A-block engine, offered for just two model years before vanishing from the lineup. Sold in a single body style and a single factory color, Sand Dune White, the Fury was instantly recognizable and genuinely rare from the day it left the showroom. Here’s the engineering and marketing story behind a car distinctive enough that one family shipped theirs across the Atlantic.
A Michigan collector’s wanted ad for any Plymouth Barracuda, in any condition, reflects just how scarce genuine survivors have become since Plymouth’s 1970 redesign turned the car into one of the era’s most sought-after E-body muscle cars. That redesign also produced the one-year-only AAR ‘Cuda, a homologation special built for Trans-Am racing that still drives collector demand today. Read on to find out what makes the 1970 model year so different from everything that came before it.