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Sammy Miller’s 1984 run at Santa Pod dragstrip in a car called Vanishing Point covered the quarter mile in 3.58 seconds at 386 miles per hour — and it wasn’t burning gasoline to do it. The car ran on hydrogen peroxide, pressurized air tanks, and a chemical reaction that produced 14,000 pounds of thrust. There’s an even faster desert run buried in the same story that never made the official record books.
A classified ad hunting for a 1932-40 Ford Coupe or a 1950s Chevy pickup might look like an ordinary want-ad, but the years being chased are anything but random. The Deuce Coupe in particular helped launch hot rodding as we know it, thanks to being the first affordable car built around a V8. Decades later, demand for one is still strong enough to inspire cash offers over the phone.
Pontiac was not supposed to build the 1964 GTO at all. A corporate rule banned engines over 330 cubic inches from the compact Tempest, so three engineers found a loophole in the option book and dropped a 389 in anyway. Management approved 5,000 units as a hedge against failure. Buyers ordered more than six times that number in the first year, and Detroit spent the next decade chasing what Pontiac started by accident.
Hurricane Irma pulled the ocean itself away from parts of the Bahamas, leaving docks stranded over bare seabed and locals staring at conch shells sitting in open air. The cause wasn’t a tsunami — it was the storm’s extreme low pressure pulling water toward its own eye. The water returned within a day, but the footage remains one of the stranger reminders of what a major hurricane can do to a coastline before it even makes landfall.
Back in 1972, Duane’s sister-in-law drove a yellow Dodge Charger off a dealer lot in Alabama — and by 2000 had decided it was worth more parked on blocks in her garage than on the road. Never touched by snow, never sold, and still owned by its original buyer, the car has become a kind of retirement fund she can start the engine on. There’s also a detail in its build sheet that shouldn’t technically exist. Read on to find out what it is.
A homemade video shot at a small Michigan dragstrip in 2001 captures something the big-budget car shows almost never do: what grassroots Mopar racing actually looked like when nobody was performing for a camera crew. Pat Muscle Car Fan’s footage from Ubly Dragstrip is a time capsule of a scene that shaped how an entire generation of Mopar owners learned to race.