 |
In spring 2017, Dodge fitted a factory production Challenger with hardware normally reserved for professional dragsters – a trans brake capable of building 534 lb-ft of launch torque via its Torque Reserve system. With 840 horsepower on 100-octane fuel, a driver’s seat as the only seat that came standard, and a production cap of just 3,300 units, the Demon reportedly ran too quick for NHRA certification without a roll cage. Read on to find out how the technology actually works.
By 1973, Ford already knew a smaller, fuel-conscious Mustang was coming the following year, making this the last chance to buy the car everyone still pictures when they hear the name. It was the final year for the convertible until 1983, the last for the Grande trim, and the closing chapter for the 351 Cobra Jet before federal regulations reshaped the entire lineup. Read on to find out what actually survived onto the order sheet before everything changed.
A seven-week, frame-up restoration of a 1968 Chevelle SS gets compressed into a short timelapse – bare-metal grinding, a full teardown, and a finished orange-striped result that has Chevelle purists arguing it’s historically inaccurate. One viewer says the video inspired them to start restoring their own 1971 Chevelle. Watch to see the transformation, stripes and all.
In this scene from The Fate of the Furious, Dom Toretto tries to escape with a stolen nuclear football while an enemy truck launches actual harpoons into his GTX-style muscle car and drags it down the street. It’s one of the most-watched clips Movieclips has ever posted, and the internet has spent years mining it for jokes about Dom’s mythical Family gear. Ridiculous as the physics are, the scene keeps a Mopar muscle car in front of tens of millions of viewers. Watch the clip that launched a thousand memes.
The 1967 Shelby GT500 traded the GT350’s twitchy small-block for a detuned police-spec 428 big-block, wrapped in the most aggressive bodywork a Mustang had worn to date. Ford’s official horsepower number fooled almost nobody who actually drove one, and the fastback body that carried it was no accident either. Read on to find out why the underrating happened in the first place.
At the 9th Annual Cantigny Park Car Show outside Chicago, Lou Costabile sits down with Bill Warzynski, who has owned this 1965 Pontiac GTO hardtop since he bought it new — nearly fifty years and counting. It’s the second model year for the car that started the muscle car era, and one commenter’s story about a neighbor’s GTO abandoned in a driveway since 1978 makes clear how rare that kind of loyalty really is. Watch to hear Warzynski’s own story of five decades with one car.
This white Mustang sparks the usual guess-the-year debate, but the answer matters more than the trivia. Ford built 190,727 Mustangs for 1970 and offered the deepest performance lineup in the nameplate’s history, from the 290-horsepower Boss 302 to just 499 Boss 429s rated at 375 horsepower. Within three model years, emissions rules, insurance surcharges and a fuel crisis had ended all of it. Read on to find out what made 1970 the high-water mark.
Chevrolet’s 1969 ZL1 option added an all-aluminum 427 to the Corvette lineup, priced high enough to nearly double the car’s cost. Only a documented handful were ever built, making it one of the rarest and most valuable factory Corvette configurations of the muscle car era. Read on to see why the option cost so much in the first place.
Speed Academy toured GM’s Tonawanda, New York engine plant to see how the 650-horsepower LT4 V8 — the most powerful engine General Motors had built at the time — comes together on the line. It’s less a robot showcase than a portrait of the people who build it, several of whom show up in the comments with decades of their own history at the plant. The video even flags its own footage: the crankshafts shown mid-tour are for the 5.3-liter EcoTec3 truck engine, not the LT4. Watch to see where a Z06’s heart is actually made.
This 1967 Ford Mustang GTA convertible isn’t just another K-code — Marti Report data confirms it’s one of the last 289 High-Performance convertibles built at Ford’s San Jose plant, and one of only 16 built with an automatic transmission. Finished in a rare Lime Gold over a white top, it packs 271 horsepower, factory disc brakes, and the same high-rpm hardware Ford gave cars built to be raced. V8TV walks through why this Brothers Collection Mustang matters to K-code collectors. Watch to see what made it one of just 50.
Muscle car. Pony car. Most enthusiasts use the terms interchangeably, and most of the time nobody calls them on it. This breakdown draws an actual line between the two categories — one built around a big engine stuffed into a mid-size body, the other built around an affordable, sporty compact platform that started with the 1964 Ford Mustang. The difference turns out to matter more than you’d think.
A dressed-up economy car isnt supposed to be a drag strip threat, but the 1969 Hurst SC/Rambler broke that rule on purpose. American Motors partnered with Hurst Performance to drop a genuine V8 into its compact Rambler platform, creating an underdog muscle car most people never saw coming from the smallest of Detroits automakers. A former AMC dealership employee still remembers the shock of watching one leave the showroom for the first time. What was AMCs overlooked drag strip terror really capable of?
A Mustang barely survived the EF5 tornado that tore through Moore, Oklahoma in 2013, left with no roof, no doors, and barely a drivetrain to its name. Rather than scrapping it, the owner turned the wreckage into a stripped-down street machine and drove it through his devastated town, putting smiles on faces that badly needed one. It happens to be a base V6, a detail that had Ford fans laughing in the comments. Whats left of this car says more about resilience than any spec sheet ever could.
Ronnie married the woman who bought this 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T brand new in April 1970. They divorced in 1978, but he kept watching the car for decades afterward, waiting for the moment she finally decided to sell. When she did, he had the first chance to buy it back. Watch the story of a marriage that ended and a car that never really left.
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.