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A straight trade between two muscle car enthusiasts in 1977 turned into one of the great sleeper stories of the era: a 1969 GTX swapped for a dark green, unassuming 1970 Ford Torino packing the Super Cobra Jet engine and factory drag pack. Read on for the specs behind the sleeper — and the dollar-on-the-dash trick that proved just how quick it really was.
A blue convertible wearing a Buick badge does not look like it should trouble the era’s biggest muscle car names, which is exactly why the 1970 GS keeps getting overlooked. Its 455 big block made 510 lb-ft of torque, more than anything else sold in America that year, and Stage 1 cars ran the quarter mile in 13.38 seconds at 105.5 mph. Here is how the quiet division built one of 1970’s fiercest cars.
Those three numbers on an Oldsmobile fender started out as a literal parts list rather than a marketing slogan, and what they stood for changed within two years of the car’s launch. The 442 began as a hurried answer to Pontiac’s GTO, grew into a standalone model with one of the era’s best-kept engineering secrets under the hood, and ended up outrunning the car it was built to chase. Here is what 4-4-2 actually meant, and why a convertible is the rarest way to own one.
Jay Leno owns more than 180 vehicles, but when The Drive asked him to pick his favorite American muscle cars, he skipped the obvious answers entirely. His list includes a 1971 Dodge Challenger, a Ford Galaxie 500 with a forgotten 7-liter engine, a 1,000-horsepower Oldsmobile Toronado, and a crate-engined Buick Roadmaster sleeper. Every pick rewards a level of car knowledge most muscle car fans do not have. See exactly why Leno chose these four over anything more obvious.
A small-block Dodge Demon 340 squares off against a big-block Camaro in a quarter-mile grudge match that turns into a genuine wheelstand, the Demon’s front end clawing skyward as both cars fight for traction off the line. Commenters are still arguing over whether outspending an opponent’s engine build counts as a real win, and at least one former Demon 340 owner shows up in the replies to defend the underdog. The gap between the two cars’ elapsed times tells its own story. Watch to see how it plays out.
The 1969 Camaro Z/28 is one of the few great muscle cars that was deliberately built without a big-block, and the reason comes down to a single number in a racing rulebook. Chevrolet’s answer was an engine cobbled together from two others, officially rated far below what it actually made. Nineteen sixty-nine was the last year for it. Read on to find out why the DZ 302 is still the most respected small-block Chevrolet ever put in a Camaro.
1970 was a terrible year to sell a Road Runner. Insurance surcharges were biting, sales fell by more than half, and Plymouth’s own new compact was quietly stealing its customers. The company responded by keeping the Hemi on the order sheet anyway, adding a functional hood scoop system, and building a handful of cars so rare that survivors now define the model. Here is what actually happened to the Road Runner in 1970, and why a bright yellow survivor is worth a second look.
John Wischmann set out to run 7-second quarter-mile passes at every stop of Rocky Mountain Race Week in a twin-turbo big-block Camaro, then drive it on public roads to the next track and do it again, without a single mechanical failure. Viewers keep comparing the turbo whistle to a screaming eagle, and the launches show almost no wasted motion or tire shake. Reliability and speed are not supposed to go together at this level. Watch to see whether this build proves that wrong.
Pontiac built 72,287 GTOs in 1969, the highest total in the model’s history, but only 759 of them received the Ram Air IV. A subdued blue car parked indoors gives away nothing about which of those buckets it belongs to. Here is what separated a base 400 from a Ram Air III from the round-port Ram Air IV, what the Judge package actually cost, and how to verify a car rather than trusting its badges.
Dennis Ermi’s 1968 Plymouth Road Runner wears a custom Pearlescent Orange and Black paint job and hides a 472-cubic-inch big-block built to make somewhere around 1,000 horsepower, numbers that have nothing to do with the nameplate’s budget-muscle-car reputation. Ermi has owned the car since 2009 and built it up gradually, the paint and engine work both added well after purchase. Viewers keep coming back to one detail in particular: the blower whine. Watch to hear it for yourself.
A small-block Chevy engine builder with decades of grease under his fingernails sets out to settle one of the hobby’s oldest arguments: which factory cylinder heads are actually worth chasing, and which ones are budget-build traps. Casting numbers, camel-hump chambers, and a warranty-replacement secret tied to the 1969 Z/28 Camaro all make an appearance. Viewers with their own engine-building histories have kept the debate going in the comments for over a decade. Watch to find out which heads made his list, and which ones did not.
Shot on a public street during Ocean City, Maryland’s biggest car week, this decade-old clip pits a Chevy S10 against a Camaro in an impromptu street pull that was never part of the official Cruisin’ Ocean City schedule. The self-deprecating title warns you how it turns out before you even press play. Watch to see why over a million people have clicked on a shaky, unbranded phone video anyway.
The 1970 Plymouth Superbird was not styled, it was shaped by a wind tunnel and a NASCAR rulebook, and every strange proportion on it exists for a reason. Fewer than 2,000 were built, three engines were offered, and only one of them is why collectors chase these cars today. Dealers could barely give them away when they were new. Read on to find out how a car nobody wanted became one of the most valuable Mopars ever built.
Edelbrock built its reputation on performance parts cast entirely in the USA, and this video takes cameras inside the two foundries where that happens — molding, pouring, machining, and final inspection, all in one place. Former employees who’ve worked the exact stations shown, from furnace operator to CMM inspector, weigh in in the comments with details the video itself doesn’t spell out. It’s a rare look at where a trusted name in muscle car parts actually comes from.
For a few short years at the end of the 1960s, win on Sunday, sell on Monday pushed Ford, Mercury, Dodge, and Plymouth into a genuine aerodynamic arms race, producing cars as strange-looking as they were fast — this MotorWeek retro review rounds up the Torino, Cyclone, Charger, and the wildest of them all, the wing-and-nose-cone Plymouth Superbird. One commenter still remembers passing on a Limelight green Superbird back in 1985, long before it became a six-figure collector car. Watch to see the machines NASCAR eventually had to legislate off the track.