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Richard Tharp partied with Willie Nelson, lived by a motto that dared anyone to take him seriously, and was widely regarded as the most colorful driver of 1970s drag racing. Buried under all of that is a single 1975 pass that broke a barrier nobody had cracked before. Read on to find out what he did in New Jersey that summer, and why the NHRA put him on its list of the greatest drivers of all time.
Every meme poking fun at fuel economy sits on top of a real and fairly dramatic piece of automotive history. Detroit spent the 1960s fighting a horsepower war with barely a thought for miles per gallon, until an oil embargo on the other side of the planet changed the rules overnight. The cars that once defined American performance suddenly looked wasteful next to imported compacts getting triple the mileage. That whiplash is still the punchline today, decades later.
Street Car Video’s August Top 10 pulled its best clip of the month from a boosted 850-horsepower Camaro squaring off with a heavily built Nissan GT-R at 180 miles per hour. This piece digs into what an LS platform needs to reach that power level, why the GT-R’s all-wheel-drive layout makes it such a stubborn equalizer, and what it actually takes to build and film a race at highway-plus speeds.
Most engine builds hide their best work under a pair of stamped steel covers. This 1964 Chevelle Super Sport does the opposite, running clear valve covers over an all-COMP valvetrain so the roller rockers and the Thumpr camshaft’s handiwork are visible to anyone who opens the hood. The result is a small block built to be watched as much as heard. Read on for what that hardware actually does, and what it costs in daily driving.
Carroll Shelby’s original pitch was simple: take a British roadster nobody in America had heard of, drop in a big V8, and build something that could embarrass cars costing three times as much. Ford said yes after Chevrolet turned him down, unwilling to create a rival for the Corvette. Only 126 Mark I Cobras were ever built, split almost evenly between two different V8s. Here’s the story behind the bloodline that started it all.
The full-size Impala rarely makes anyone’s mental list of great muscle cars, which usually starts with Mustangs, Camaros, Chevelles, and Chargers. But before the Chevelle existed, the Impala SS was where Chevrolet kept its performance program, and the engines available in it were serious enough that the Beach Boys wrote a hit song about one. The case for reassessing the Impala is stronger than the hobby generally admits.
Fatal Motorsports’ eighth installment of ricers, fails, and questionable driving decisions pulled over a million views — which says something about how precisely the format hits its audience. Whether you are there for the ricer fails, the compilation editing, or simply the shared experience of watching bad decisions play out in automotive form, Episode 8 delivers on the format that built the channel’s following.
Dale and Phyllis bought their Boss 429 Mustang new on March 18, 1969, from a dealer in Memphis, and then did something almost nobody does: they kept every piece of paper that came with it. Nearly five decades and 21,400 miles later, the car crossed the block at Barrett-Jackson in Las Vegas still wearing its original drivetrain and carrying its window sticker. Read on for why that documentation is worth as much as the engine.
Car shows have paired glamour with chrome since long before social media existed, and this shot is part of that decades-old tradition. Detroit’s ad agencies leaned on the same formula during the muscle car horsepower wars, using lifestyle imagery to sell engines as much as looks. It raises an old debate that’s never really been settled: when a photo like this shows up, what’s actually catching your eye first?
More than 1.7 million people watched this road confrontation between a car driver and a group of bikers, and most of them were surprised by how it ended. The footage captures an escalating situation that resolves in ways neither party seemed to anticipate, and the reaction it generated reflects exactly how unexpectedly the outcome arrives. Whether you ride, drive, or simply pay attention to what happens on public roads, this one is worth watching.
Lane assist feels like a modern convenience, but its origins trace back to a single 2005 Infiniti built to fight a specific killer: unnoticed lane drift. What began as a pricey luxury option has since trickled down to nearly every new car on the road. Here’s how a camera watching white lines turned into one of the industry’s most common safety features – and why some resto-mod builders are even retrofitting it into classic muscle cars.
One jump – sixteen feet high, eighty-two feet long – made this orange Charger more famous than the show itself. More than 320 identical cars were destroyed getting that stunt on film, and the welded-shut doors weren’t a style choice; they were what was left after the abuse this car was built to take.
This convertible’s color and stripe combination are the easy part of the guessing game – the real question is what’s under the hood. If it’s the LS6, you’re looking at one of just 4,475 ever built, an engine strong enough to beat a Road Runner 440 Six Pack and a Torino Cobra 429 in period Motor Trend testing.
A meme with four simple words – ‘real men drive luxury cars’ – sets up an expectation it has no intention of honoring. The payoff is a supercharged monster instead, and researchers who study car culture say the joke works because it taps into decades-old ideas about power, status, and who’s supposed to be behind the wheel.
The 1969 Camaro shows up at nearly every car show in America, which makes it easy to forget how enormous the gap is between a base six-cylinder car and a COPO 427. Same body, same year, wildly different money. Hagerty’s Stefan Lombard walks through what actually separates them and where the traps are hiding. Read on to find out what to check before you write a deposit on one.