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Phil Martin sold his 1965 GTO, regretted it, and bought this charcoal blue 1966 replacement in 1995 to fill the gap it left behind. Lou Costabile catches up with Phil and the car at Rosemont’s World of Wheels show, and the comments spend as much time praising the restoration work as they do debating whether 1966 or 1967 wore the GTO’s taillights better.
Windstream’s Locally Crafted Goods series profiles Dave Hall, owner of Restore A Muscle Car in Lincoln, Nebraska, a shop built on reconnecting people with the classic cars they once owned and thought were gone for good. Hall’s current project, a father-and-son ’70 Trans-Am restoration, captures exactly why his small-town shop has built a following well beyond state lines. It’s a story about craftsmanship as much as community. Watch to see what makes his approach different.
Somewhere between the Ford GT40 and the much-mocked Pontiac Fiero sits a 1965 Chevrolet Corvair that owner Chuck Rust turned into a mid-engine V8 sports car using the little-known “Crown” conversion kit. Builders who attempted this exact swap decades ago describe cracked differentials, hand-fabricated input shafts, and a kit that solved only the easy part of the problem. With a claimed pedigree that traces back to Smokey Yunick’s praise for a properly sorted Corvair, this homebuilt project asks what America’s mid-engine sports car could have been.
Omni Rider breaks teenage drivers into five familiar types — the texter, the show-off, the secretly fast one, the overly cautious rookie, and the speed-chaser — and the comments immediately pile on with archetypes the video missed entirely, from the parking-lot curb-checker to the mythical Crown Victoria owner every school seems to have had. See which type you were, or still are.
EngineLabs handed two teams an identical $9,999 budget and one instruction: build the strongest engine possible, Ford’s Coyote for one, GM’s LS3 for the other. The result is less a definitive winner and more a clinic in budget-build tradeoffs, big pushrod displacement against high-revving overhead cams, cheap aftermarket parts against premium modular components. Even the comments split along brand lines, with one self-described “Ford guy” breaking ranks to praise the LS3 outright. Watch the full build to see which philosophy actually made more power for the money, and decide for yourself which side of this rivalry your own garage falls on.
Van Hurst’s father once owned this 1969 Chevelle COPO — before it left the family, disappeared for years, and turned up again through nothing more than an internet search. Built through Chevrolet’s Central Office Production Order loophole, the car was deliberately disguised as a base-model Malibu to hide its 427 big block from the crowd. Between a Chilean sighting decades ago and a trio of Calgary neighbors who bought sister cars together in 1969, this COPO’s story stretches well past its own build sheet. Watch the full reunion.
MotorTrend pits a numbers-matching 1969 Pontiac GTO Judge against a twin-turbo, 750-horsepower 2006 GTO inside Ken Lingenfelter’s personal collection, then asks a simple question with no easy answer: which one would you actually want to drive? The Judge brings 1969 history and mechanical honesty; the modern car brings more than double the factory horsepower. Watch the comment section split right down generational lines.
Plymouth built the Superbird to win NASCAR homologation rules, not showroom popularity contests — and dealers struggled to move them when they launched in 1970. USClassicMuscleCars caught up with a raw, uniquely restored example at the MuscleCars and Corvette Nationals in Chicago, and its road back from unsellable oddity to seven-figure icon is worth understanding before you watch the interview.
A 1967 television commercial for the Pontiac GTO sold horsepower the way modern car ads almost never do – through swagger, identity, and a voice actor’s delivery that viewers are still praising decades later. One commenter even traces BMW’s Ultimate Driving Machine slogan back to what Pontiac was already doing here first. Watch to hear the pitch that built a legend.
Filmed in 2007 for a television series most viewers have never heard of, this segment captures a 1971 Plymouth Cuda’s 440 Six Pack coming to life under Legendary Motorcar’s care. The triple-carburetor setup gives the big-block a distinctive burble that Mopar collectors can pick out by ear alone. See why this specific engine badge still commands serious money and even more serious attention.
The 1969 Firebird Trans Am existed for exactly one model year in this form, wearing a color combination buyers couldn’t change and stripes that ran straight over the roof, a look Pontiac never repeated. This Ram Air III 4-speed example from The Brothers Collection pairs that one-year-only styling with a functional hood feeding a 400 cubic inch V8. See what made the very first Trans Am look and drive like nothing else on the lot.
This 1964 Dodge Polara isn’t numbers-matching — and one commenter says that hasn’t stopped it from being “worth every penny” of its roughly $39,000 asking price. Under the hood is a full crossram 426 Max Wedge with dual four-barrels and fender-exit headers, backed by a four-speed and a 4.11-geared Dana 60 built purely for launching hard. A full-size sleeper with a well-preserved original interior, it’s the kind of Mopar that collectors chase for substance over paperwork. Watch the walkaround and hear it run.
Veteran drag racer Nick Scavo walks through exactly how to pack a parachute for drag racing, footage pulled from the V8TV Archives and produced by Kevin Oeste. At speeds where brakes alone can’t stop a car safely, a parachute packed wrong can fail at the worst possible moment. This is hands-on knowledge rarely captured on camera. Watch to see the precise, repeatable process a real racer trusts his own safety to.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety put a trio of America’s best-known sports coupes through its full crash test battery in a May 2016 release, and none of them walked away with a TOP SAFETY PICK award. Long hoods, low rooflines, and rear-drive proportions built for speed don’t always cooperate with small-overlap crash structure. What actually held these pony cars back is more specific than the headline suggests. Watch to see how the numbers break down.
A stock 1969 Dodge Charger, an authentic Charger Daytona with its full nose cone and rear wing, and a modern 2015 Hellcat all go through the same wind tunnel to answer a question muscle car fans have argued for decades: how much did the Daytona’s radical aero package actually do? NASCAR banned the bodywork almost as soon as it proved effective. Watch to see what the real numbers say, fifty years later.