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Pontiac was not supposed to build the 1964 GTO at all. A corporate rule banned engines over 330 cubic inches from the compact Tempest, so three engineers found a loophole in the option book and dropped a 389 in anyway. Management approved 5,000 units as a hedge against failure. Buyers ordered more than six times that number in the first year, and Detroit spent the next decade chasing what Pontiac started by accident.
An Army aircraft mechanic stationed overseas bought this rust-free 1971 Dodge Charger sight-unseen, with plans to drop in a 572-cubic-inch Hemi built for over 800 horsepower. Before the media blasting and undercoating are even finished, one question remains unresolved: stick with factory-correct yellow, or go full restomod with flat black and bold stripes? The build taps into a growing wave of big-block Charger restomods that trade numbers-matching originality for modern muscle and serious street presence.
A magazine assignment to imagine a forgotten luxury nameplate reborn somehow became a fully functional one-off, built on a genuine Shelby Cobra chassis and dressed in copper and brass. Commissioned by a metals trade association rather than an automaker, the Mercer-Cobra combined retro coachbuilt styling with real Shelby performance underneath. Decades later, it sold for $660,000 at a Monterey auction. How does a concept car built to promote copper end up among the most valuable one-offs in Shelby history?
A flyer promising prize money at a March drag shootout doesn’t tell you much on its own — but the track behind it, an NHRA-affiliated eighth-mile strip built for grudge racing and small-tire shootouts, has plenty of story to it. Door-crasher format, cash on the line, and a community that shows up test-and-tune after test-and-tune. Here’s what actually happens when the tree drops and real money’s riding on it.
Ford rated this Mustang’s big block at just 375 horsepower, a figure almost nobody who drove one actually believed. Built to satisfy NASCAR homologation rules and assembled outside the factory by an outside engineering firm, this car packed race-bred internals most buyers never fully understood. Discover why enthusiasts still debate its real output decades later, and how a Hemi-inspired head design ended up under a Ford hood.
One of our readers walked into a Chevrolet showroom in 1967 while still in high school, paid cash, and drove home in a brand-new Camaro that never left his ownership. Fifty years later the car is still immaculate, wearing dual white racing stripes and a story most muscle car fans only dream about. Read on to find out what it actually takes to keep a first car for half a century.
Car and Driver spent the 1960s testing everything from factory Corvettes to a road-going Ford GT40, all reduced to the same simple number: 0-60 mph. Two Shelby Cobras claimed the top two spots, one of them clocked at a scarcely believable 4.3 seconds, while a small-block Mustang GT snuck onto the list ahead of genuine big-block muscle. Read on to see how all twelve cars stacked up — and why the testing methods behind these numbers deserve an asterisk.
Six decades after Russ Snowberger wheeled his own cars around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, his son John has taken on the job his father never got to finish. This 1952 Indy-style racer sat quietly for decades before the Snowberger family decided its story deserved a second act. What emerges is less a restoration than a homecoming, one built from memory, patience, and a name that once ran with the best at the Brickyard.
The first car ever to wear the Dodge Charger name was built to introduce America to the 426 Hemi, but the engine slated for it got pulled at the last minute to save a race team’s season. What actually powered this showcar for years was a secret hiding in plain sight. Decades later, a full restoration finally gave it the Hemi it was always supposed to have, and turned it into a seven-figure piece of Mopar history.
Chevrolet’s 2018 NASCAR Cup Series entry borrowed its ZL1-inspired styling from the street car but almost nothing else, running a purpose-built racing V8 instead of the supercharged engine buyers could actually order. The switch came after the Chevrolet SS, its predecessor, was discontinued with little warning. Read on to find out what makes the Cup car’s engine so different from anything on a showroom floor.
Mike Hall listed his five-acre British Columbia property for $1.45 million in 2017 — house, shop, and more than 300 vintage cars included in one package deal. Instead of a quiet sale, the listing went viral and turned into Rust Valley Restorers, the TV show that made Hall’s ever-growing junkyard famous. Here’s how a guy who couldn’t count his own car collection ended up on television because of it.
The mistakes that cost muscle car buyers the most money rarely feel like mistakes at the time: taking numbers matching on faith, trusting fresh paint, skipping the inspection, treating the title as a formality, mistaking a clone for the real thing, and letting emotion set the price. This article walks through each of them, why they happen, and the simple checks that prevent them, along with the costs that arrive after the sale and how to budget for them. Read on to find out where buyers actually get burned and how to avoid joining them.
A 1970 Chevelle originally built with a 396 sat outdoors in Indiana for twenty years after a work injury stalled its first restoration attempt. In 2012, a grandfather and grandson struck a deal to finish the job, eventually digging the car’s original SS wheels out from six feet of dirt in a collapsed shed. Read on to find out what powers it now.
From the mid-1950s through the 1970s, street racers ruled the boulevard, the drive-in, and the local dragstrip, marking their best times in shoe polish on the windshield for the whole school to see. Crashes, license suspensions, and new laws eventually ended the era, but a surprising number of cars survived, quietly passed down to children and grandchildren who still race them today. Read on to find out where this culture actually played out.
Ed Wheeldon, known on the drag strip as Fast Eddie, once turned down a $250,000 offer for his 1968 Dodge Dart, a genuine factory Hemi Super Stock he still races at Eddyville Dragway for a $200 appearance fee. Mopar Max Magazine later put him on its cover after the car ran a best pass of 6.501 seconds. Few six-figure Hemi drag cars still see the strip today. Find out why Wheeldon insists on keeping his in the game.