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Mercury had a problem in 1968: everybody thought the Cougar was a Mustang for people who wanted leather seats and a quieter ride. The Eliminator was the answer, and it was not subtle. Competition colors, a blacked-out grille, a rear spoiler, and an engine list running from a Boss 302 to a pair of 428 Cobra Jets. Mercury built it for only two model years and roughly 4,500 total. Read on for the Trans-Am racer Mercury almost did not build.
1971 does not get talked about much in El Camino circles, and there is a reason. New emissions rules forced compression down across GM’s entire engine lineup, and the car-truck hybrid felt the squeeze for the first time. But the 454 was still on the order sheet, the SS package still meant something, and a big-block 1971 remains a narrow window into the last real muscle-era El Caminos. Read on for what was still worth ordering.
Bond’s DB5 and Dom Toretto’s Charger are not the only movie muscle cars worth remembering. A black Trans Am and a customized Mustang fastback both left just as big a mark on car culture, one by boosting real-world sales and the other by spawning an entire tribute-car industry. Here is the rest of the list.
The car everyone calls General Lee was never one car. It was a small army of 1969 Dodge Chargers, and most of them did not survive the job. Across 147 episodes, producers reportedly went through roughly 300 of them, scouting from the air and buying out of parking lots faster than the used car market could supply them. Only 18 were left on the lot when the show wrapped. Read on for the most destructive relationship between a TV show and a car in Hollywood history.
Mikey V has owned his 1972 AMC Javelin SST since it left the factory, the result of a question his American Motors employee father once asked him: Hornet or Javelin? Lou Costabile found the car, now packing roughly 900 horsepower, at Wisconsin’s World of Wheels show. Weather permitting, it is still his daily driver. Watch to see what happens when a car built for grocery runs gets pushed this far past stock.
A Plymouth Cuda and a Chevy S10 pickup should not belong in the same drag racing conversation, but both of these builds run genuine 10-second quarter miles at Palm Beach International Raceway. One is a muscle car icon pushed well past factory spec, the other is an unglamorous compact truck turned sleeper. Watch two completely different paths to the same performance number collide on the same night.
Solo’s white 392 Hemi Dodge Challenger rides on a set of 32 inch Amani floater wheels, the kind of custom build most owners keep spotless and parked well away from trouble. AceWhips.NET caught him doing the opposite, laying into the throttle until the rear tires disappeared in smoke. Between the six figure wheel investment and a 485 horsepower Hemi, the physics alone make this a risky flex. Watch to see how much smoke a stretched 32 inch setup can actually produce.
Larry F. bought his first car in 1977 for $400: a white 1970 Pontiac GTO that broke his father’s one rule about first cars. He spent two years rebuilding it, drove it for years, and sold it in 1988 for $800 before the muscle car market took off. Years later, walking through an Illinois junkyard with his son, he found out exactly what became of it. Read on to find out what he saw.
Buick’s turbocharged 3.8 liter V6 should have ended when the Regal went front wheel drive in 1988, but this final episode of OldCarMemories.com’s series tracks its unexpected last stop: a 1989 Pontiac Trans Am. The engine used Pontiac heads instead of Buick’s own and reportedly paced the Indy 500 as a genuinely stock car, a first. Watch to see how a mid size sedan engine ended up the fastest thing on a GM showroom floor.
The Ford Falcon Sprint never got a nickname, a movie role, or a bedroom poster, and yet the Mustang almost certainly does not happen without it. For two and a half model years it quietly proved Americans would pay extra for a compact with a V8 under the hood, then disappeared the moment its own successor reached showrooms. Its platform, suspension, and engines all carried straight over. Read on for the compact Ford that wrote the pony car playbook first.
A supercharged Camaro ZL1 — reportedly belonging to host Liel Levy’s father — takes on a modified BMW and a $200,000 Bentley in this street-racing matchup. The factory 650-horsepower LT4 V8 makes the outcome closer than the video’s title suggests, and the comments are still arguing about just how close it really was. Watch to see how the numbers play out on the street.
It looks like it belongs at a WWII reenactment, not lining up against a 638-horsepower supercharged Corvette, yet this LS-swapped Willys Jeep just added a nitrous shot to an already potent combination and started pulling its front wheels off the pavement. The result: a boxy, aerodynamically hopeless off-roader hunting down one of the quickest factory Corvettes ever built on a public street. Some viewers are cheering the power-to-weight absurdity; others are asking pointed questions about roll cages. Either way, five million-plus views suggest this ugly-duckling street racer isnt done making noise.
MotorTrend’s Matt picks a 1987 Buick GNX, one of the most respected turbocharged muscle cars ever built. Davin counters with a 1969 Chevelle that looks like a grandmother’s grocery getter but hides a genuine COPO 427 under the hood. The comment section splits almost exactly in half, and the arguments get more detailed than most professional reviews. Watch to see which era wins this round.
Ten cars, ten launches that went further than anyone planned, and a comment section that has spent years arguing over which wheelstand actually did the most damage. From a Camaro pulling a clean four wheel liftoff to a decal that peels clean off mid launch, this compilation packs an entire drag strip season of chaos into a few minutes. Watch to see which landing you would have bet against.
Hagerty’s Stefan Lombard stands beside a documented 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T from the Lingenfelter Collection to show buyers exactly what separates a real numbers-matching car from an expensive clone. The guide covers fender tags, VIN decoding, common rust spots, and why only 137 R/T Hemi hardtops left the factory with the pistol-grip four-speed. It’s the same checklist serious collectors use before writing a check on a fifty-year-old muscle car. Watch to see what most buyers miss.