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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 about 12 seconds at nearly 117 mph while touring dragstrips across North America from 1966 to 1968. Here’s the real racing story behind Batman’s other car.
This 1969 Plymouth Road Runner A12 was Chrysler’s original pilot car — the very first A12 package ever built, tested and tuned by Mopar legend Ronnie Sox before it landed a feature in Super Stock Magazine. Under the fiberglass hood sits a 440 Six Barrel rated at 390 horsepower, backed by a four-speed and 4.10 gears. Chrysler called it the fastest A12 ever built. Watch to see what earned it that title.
For years, Detroit street racers only knew the Black Ghost by reputation, a black 1970 Challenger R/T SE with a 426 Hemi that beat them and vanished before anyone learned who was driving. Gregory Qualls knows exactly who, because it was his father, an off-duty Detroit police officer. After decades in storage, the car resurfaced, earned a spot on the National Historic Vehicle Register, and inspired a full documentary. Hear the son tell the story only he can tell.
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.
This 1967 Dodge Coronet R/T showed up at the 2013 Pigeon Forge Rod Run wearing a 426 HEMI badge, one of the rarest engine options Dodge ever put in a midsize body, and got nothing more than a quick, unscripted walk-around. No narration, no backstory, just a camera and a car worth stopping for. What that raw footage reveals, and what separates a documented HEMI Coronet from the clones that outnumber them, comes down to details most people would walk right past.
A viewer’s engine ran smooth, started fine, and seemed simply low on power, until he pulled a worn camshaft and found some valves barely opening at all. Engineering Explained’s Jason Fenske breaks down the four things every gasoline engine needs to make power, and why each one quietly fades with age. One fix turned into a bigger power gain than anyone expected. What’s actually happening inside an engine that feels “just old”?
David Freiburger spends this episode of Roadkill Extra doing something Roadkill rarely does: teaching, not wrecking. Compression ratio sounds like a spec sheet footnote until he breaks down exactly how bore, stroke, chamber volume, and camshaft timing all feed into the number that decides how much power an engine can make before it starts destroying itself. It’s the kind of explanation builders bookmark and come back to before their next build. Find out what the calculator actually needs to get right.
Some cars get decades of careful restoration. This 1969 Camaro SS got decades in a barn instead — and it still stopped traffic at the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals. Under the hood is a 396-cubic-inch L78, once the most powerful regular production engine Chevrolet offered. Watch to see what makes this unrestored survivor one of the show’s genuine hidden gems.
Ranking eight classic muscle cars purely by horsepower sounds simple until you have to correctly identify which engine is actually under each hood — and this silent, subtitle-only countdown ran straight into that problem. One sharp-eyed commenter flagged what looks like a 440-badged Mopar mislabeled as a 426 Hemi. Watch the full ranking and see if you can spot the mix-up yourself.
Dodge built just 628 convertible versions of its 1967 Coronet R/T, and owner Glen Kellmann says that in more than twenty years of attending car shows, he has never once come across another one. See his factory 440-powered survivor and hear the story of a car that, as far as its own owner can tell, has no twin.
Drag racing looks like the simplest form of motorsport there is — two cars, a green light, first to the finish line wins. A pair of road-racing enthusiasts attended their first-ever drag event to test that assumption, and quickly discovered how much nuance hides behind 60-foot times, reaction times, and track prep. Watch to find out what actually separates a winning run from a losing one.
AMC never had the budget of Ford, GM, or Chrysler, but its Trans-Am racing program with driver Mark Donohue gave the underdog manufacturer real credibility — and this 1970 AMX Javelin in factory Big Bad Blue is the street-legal result. Owner Roger Nelson has driven and shown the car since 2007, and he knows every detail of what makes it different from a standard Javelin. Watch to find out what a factory 390 and a racing pedigree add up to.
A 1960 Ford Falcon doesn’t look like the kind of car that inspires cult devotion, yet Regular Car Reviews’ take on Robert McNamara’s “love-letter to bean-counting” has fans quoting its closing line years later. Between an Argentine cousin racing to 600 horsepower and an Australian descendant that became a turbocharged legend, this humble compact’s story reaches far beyond its stock inline-six. One viewer’s family memory of a steering wheel coming off on the Beltway says the rest.