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Not every car wearing a muscle badge earned it. Car News Central rounds up the worst and slowest so-called muscle cars ever built — the malaise-era disappointments, the badge-engineered impostors, and the once-proud nameplates that limped through the 1970s making embarrassing power. It is a tour through the industry’s most awkward decade, and some of the entries will sting. Find out which legendary names ended up on the wrong list.
The 2017 Cadillac CTS-V arrives at Road America with 640 supercharged horsepower and something to prove. Everyday Reviews takes the third-generation super-sedan onto one of America’s fastest, most demanding road courses to see whether a luxury four-door can really run with dedicated track cars. Spoiler: you don’t need to be a pro to have a riot in this thing. See how a Cadillac behaves when the corners come at triple-digit speed.
A classic Chevrolet Chevelle idles with a sound no small block ever made — a low, diesel clatter where a rumbling V8 should be. Someone dropped a GM Duramax turbodiesel between the fenders of a car built for gasoline and tire smoke, and the result is one of the more unexpected builds in the muscle car world. It shouldn’t work, and yet the torque figures make a compelling argument. Find out why a diesel Chevelle turns so many heads.
This muscle car isn’t smoking because something went wrong, it’s smoking because someone made it happen on purpose. Burnouts started as simple tire prep for drag racing before evolving into one of muscle car culture’s proudest traditions. What looks like chaos in this photo is actually a driver carefully balancing throttle and wheel speed for maximum effect.
At the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals, Lou Costabile finds a 1961 Ford Galaxie Starliner that took its owner eight years to bring back. Under the hood sits a 390 cubic-inch big block making a stout 401 horsepower, wrapped in one of the prettiest fastback rooflines Ford ever drew. Owner Zach Straits walks through what the restoration cost him in time and patience. Find out why this early-’60s Ford was worth almost a decade of work.
A 1965 Shelby GT350 and its modern namesake share the same badge, the same maker, and almost nothing else. One is a stripped-down homologation racer with a solid-lifter 289; the other is a flat-plane-crank, carbon-trimmed track weapon built five decades later. Gears and Gasoline got Bob and Sam to bring both together, and the gap between them says everything about how far the pony car has traveled. See what fifty-one years of heritage really looks like side by side.
Two turbocharged GM legends line up under one roof, and neither one is playing fair. On one side sits Red Dragon, a Camaro SS spinning roughly 420 wheel horsepower through a Turbonetics 60-1. On the other, a third-gen Trans Am running more boost every pass and a shot of methanol to keep it alive. One is consistent; one keeps raising the stakes. Watch to see which philosophy actually wins.
A supercharger punching through the hood of this orange ‘Cuda is daring onlookers to guess both the year and just how much power is hiding underneath. If this is the 1969 model, it landed the year the ‘Cuda package became Plymouth’s most serious pony car statement, with factory V8s already reaching 375 horsepower before anyone added a blower.
A close crop of chrome grille and quad headlights is all this guessing game gives away, and that’s plenty to start an argument among Thunderbird fans. Ford reinvented the ‘Bird’s face almost every generation between 1955 and the early 1970s, from sports car to four-seat luxury cruiser. Can you place the exact year from the grille alone?
A Panther Pink 1970 Dodge Challenger T/A rolls onto the dyno at a Mopar show in Farmington, Minnesota, and the crowd stops talking. The color says toy store; the sound coming off the rollers says something else entirely. This is a homologation-bred street brawler wearing one of Detroit’s most disarming paint codes, and the readout everyone leaned in to see tells the real story. Find out what a car this pink is actually hiding.
Behind the orange paint and Confederate flag roof was a genuine 1969 Dodge Charger R/T, one of roughly 300 identical cars destroyed making a single television show. The hero cars carried a 375-horsepower 440 Magnum V8 backed by a four-speed manual, while lesser 318s and 383s handled routine driving scenes. Stunt drivers saved the 440-powered cars for one job only: the jumps.
A sun-drenched restoration photo with no badges in sight is daring muscle car fans to name the year and engine hiding under the hood. This nameplate saw a major style refresh and an option-package shakeup in a single model year, while its engine lineup ranged from a mild 325-horsepower V8 to a 425-horsepower COPO sleeper most buyers never even knew existed.
Taking your sister for a ride in a thousand-horsepower Camaro should be the fun part. In this clip from John Doc, it turns into the moment the whole day falls apart. His heavily built street Camaro lives permanently on the edge of its own limits, and this outing is where that edge finally bites. It is a real-time reminder that the same mods making a car violently fast also make it fragile. Watch to see what let go, and what it cost.
Drag racing’s rulebook was not written in a boardroom, it was written after things went wrong on the strip. This piece traces the sport’s safety evolution from NHRA’s 1954 “Drag Safari” through mandatory fire suits and five-point harnesses, and the real incidents that reshaped the rules for everyone who raced after them.
What happens when engineers deliberately hunt for the moment an engine grenades? In this Engine Masters episode from MotorTrend, the victim is a humble stock 305 Chevy small-block, still wearing its factory cast crank and pistons, fed more and more nitrous until something lets go. Before the inevitable failure, the dyno reveals exactly how much a stock bottom end can take and how to run nitrous safely. It is spectacle and genuine education in one. Watch to see how much the little 305 could stand.