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Ford has spent six decades building genuinely different kinds of muscle cars, from the original 1964 Mustang that sold 400,000 units in its first year to Shelby’s race-bred GT350 and GT500, all the way to the homologation-only Boss 302 and Boss 429. Take the quiz and the real question isn’t which car is fastest – it’s which era of Ford’s muscle car identity actually matches how you’d drive. Here’s the history behind every option on the list.
A Muscle Car Fan reader recalls buying his first real performance car, a 1969 GTO nicknamed The Goat, for $1,200 in the summer of 1979, then living an entire high school year defined by drag races, a blown clutch on his first date, and a January night that ended with a friend’s Fairlane wrapped around a utility pole. Somehow nobody called the police on him. Read on for how the story, and the car, both ended.
At sixteen, John C. paid $700 in paper-route savings for a 1971 Plymouth Satellite Sebring, then spent the next few years turning it into a Rallye Red, leopard-interior statement piece that eventually earned him a police citation for riding too high. His story, and the garage full of friends’ cars parked alongside his, capture a slice of 1970s car culture that never made it into any factory brochure. Read on for the full build, the ticket, and the friends who were building right alongside him.
An 11-alarm fire tore through a 530-foot warehouse at Country Classic Cars in Staunton, Illinois, destroying 143 vehicles including one-of-a-kind Hemi Road Runners, Chevelles, and Camaros. Investigators traced the blaze to one of five cars in the building’s center but never confirmed a cause. Here’s what happened, and what was lost, the night one of Route 66’s best-known classic car dealerships caught fire.
Dean Jeffries built two Monkeemobiles from Pontiac GTO convertibles in four weeks flat, and only one of them was ever meant to matter. The second car spent years overseas as a hotel courtesy vehicle before it was recovered and restored. In January 2008 it crossed the Barrett-Jackson block in Scottsdale for $360,000. Read on for how a promotional prop became one of the most valuable television cars ever sold.
Chrysler built roughly 9,137 street Hemi cars between 1966 and 1971, and only a sliver of them left the factory as convertibles. The 1970 Dodge Coronet R/T Hemi convertible is widely considered the rarest of the bunch at just two built, with Hagerty pegging a top example near $1.3 million. A numbers-matching 1971 Hemi ‘Cuda convertible brought $3.5 million at Mecum in 2014. Read on for why the drop-tops are so scarce and what separates a real one from a clone.
In 1984, a dare on a dirt road outside Kingman, Arizona taught Vicki how to drive a stick shift in her sister’s black 1967 Camaro RS/SS — and planted a want that took nearly thirty years to satisfy. In 2013, she finally found her own, an almost perfectly restored example listed on Craigslist in Brooklyn, Michigan. Read on for how one proving-them-wrong moment turned into a lifelong Camaro obsession, complete with a matching-numbers engine still waiting for its turn.
Brad Mathis learned to drive on his grandfather’s grasshopper-green AMC Javelin AMX — a fully loaded “Go Package” car built by a man who spent his career working inside AMC’s High-Speed Stop Division. What started as supervised laps around a garage at age twelve grew into a personal collection of seven AMC vehicles and a Javelin now in its fourth generation of family ownership. Read on for how one family turned a single car into a lifelong AMC obsession.
Ford built exactly 100 examples of the 1964 Thunderbolt, a factory-only drag racer disguised as an ordinary Fairlane, and handed every buyer a glovebox plate warning them the car didn’t meet normal quality standards. Underneath sat a 427-cubic-inch V8 unofficially estimated at 600 horsepower, fiberglass body panels, and a compression ratio closer to a diesel engine than a street car. The Thunderbolt secured Ford’s 1964 NHRA Super Stock title and still sparks arguments about how it would have fared against a stock Shelby Cobra. Read on for the numbers behind the legend.
Henry Ford once bought roughly 430,000 acres of Michigan timberland just to supply the hardwood for his station wagons, running his own sawmill to shape doors, dashboards, and headliners by hand. That wood-bodied construction disappeared by the early 1950s once steel proved cheaper and more durable, but the woodie’s story didn’t end there. A decade later, surfers turned aging wagons into rolling icons of the California coast, the same cars later name-checked in songs like the one that opens this post. Here’s how a grocery-hauler became a cultural symbol.
Not every muscle car story ends with a perfectly restored survivor in a climate-controlled garage. Longtime member Carl N.’s collection spans a 1970 Barracuda, two vintage Ford trucks, and a trade that eventually led to a Chevy van — a messier, more realistic version of what six decades of car ownership actually looks like. Here’s the history behind the cars in his story, and why this kind of winding path is more common than the highlight-reel restorations.
Water damage does not stop when the flood recedes. Corrosion in the wiring and sensors can take months to surface, and a surprising number of flooded cars quietly reappear on the used market with clean-looking titles. Beyond the essential first steps of disconnecting the battery and never starting the engine, there is a bigger risk buyers need to understand. Here is what actually happens to a car after it floods, and how to avoid buying someone else’s flood car later.
An orange A-body sitting on a consignment lot in Dearborn looks period correct until it starts. What is under the hood was designed thirty-five years after the body was stamped, makes about 150 more horsepower than the engine that belongs there, and has become one of the most popular swaps in the Mopar world. Read on for why builders keep reaching for this particular engine instead of something newer.
This mystery concept car offers no easy clues, no badge, no plaque, just a shape that clearly belongs to an era when auto shows were the only place to see a manufacturer’s wildest ideas. Concept cars like this trace back to events such as GM’s legendary Motorama tours of the 1950s. Take a close look at the proportions and styling details before scrolling past. Can you guess the year, make, and model before we reveal it?
Richard Tharp partied with Willie Nelson, lived by a motto that dared anyone to take him seriously, and was widely regarded as the most colorful driver of 1970s drag racing. Buried under all of that is a single 1975 pass that broke a barrier nobody had cracked before. Read on to find out what he did in New Jersey that summer, and why the NHRA put him on its list of the greatest drivers of all time.