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Chevrolet built the 1987 Monte Carlo SS Aerocoupe strictly to satisfy NASCAR’s homologation rules — but production exploded from 200 cars in 1986 to over 6,000 the following year once buyers caught on. That steeply raked backlight wasn’t just a superspeedway trick; it turned into one of the most collectible G-bodies Chevrolet ever built.
In 1960, half a million Americans bought a Chevrolet Impala, making it the best-selling car in the country that year. Most drove home with a modest six-cylinder or small V-8 — but buried in the order form sat a genuine big-block option most showroom shoppers never noticed. Five versions of the 348 cubic-inch engine, topped by a 335-horsepower tri-power variant, turned an ordinary family car into a legitimate sleeper. Read on to see why collectors hunt for that combination specifically.
This 1962 Buick Invicta wagon carries the nickname “Airwagon,” earned when Air Ride Technologies took on the rare nine-passenger body style as a build project. Under the hood sits a numbers-matching 401 Nailhead V8, swapped from its original two-speed Turbine Drive automatic to a smoother four-speed. Gateway Classic Cars photographed the full car for this gallery, from the engine bay to the polished chrome trim, one of the least common body styles Buick built during the Invicta’s run.
The 1940 Ford Deluxe didn’t just out-style its Depression-era rivals — it quietly became one of the best-selling cars in America and handed hot rodders the flathead V-8 platform they’d spend the next fifty years building an entire culture around. From the Lincoln Zephyr-inspired nose to the three-speed column shifter, every detail on this car earned its keep.
This 1968 Camaro pairs the SS-package 350 V8 – good for 295 horsepower and 380 lb-ft of torque – with the desirable M20 wide-ratio four-speed manual. It’s also a car built in the one model year that offered ten different engines and introduced federally mandated side marker lights along with the vent-window-deleting “Astro Ventilation” design, small details that separate a ’68 Camaro from the ’67 it followed.
A 3.8-liter V6 and a 3-speed automatic don’t sound like the recipe for one of America’s best-selling cars, yet that’s roughly what powered this silver 1984 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. Between five available powertrains and four trim levels, Oldsmobile built a formula flexible enough to out-sell nearly everything else on the road. Read on to see how a mild-mannered mid-size coupe pulled that off.
1969 was the final and best-selling year of the original Camaro, with a mid-cycle restyle that gave the car its most aggressive first-generation look. Small-block, automatic-equipped cars like this one were far more common than the COPO 427 legends that dominate auction headlines — and they’re just as much a part of the model’s story.
Ten thousand photographs, six months of shop time, and one badly worn 1967 Mustang convertible come together in this time-lapse restoration from Julius Bencko’s former shop, Mustangs4you.com. Convertibles from this era carry restoration challenges hardtops never face, from reinforced unibody structure to convertible-specific top mechanisms that are notoriously difficult to source. Watch a frame-off restoration compress six months of invisible labor into just a few minutes.
In 1964, Ford squeezed a race-bred 427 V8 into the Galaxie 500, and NASCAR promptly banned the racing version as “too exotic” before it could dominate a single superspeedway. Only 3,140 R-code Galaxies were built that year, and just 76 are known to survive today. Here’s the story behind Ford’s short-lived big-block gamble and the handful of survivors still turning heads.
This 1934 Ford, nicknamed ‘Panther’ by its current owners, was built just two years after Ford introduced its groundbreaking flathead V8, the engine that made eight-cylinder power affordable for the first time. By 1934, Ford had resolved the flathead’s early reliability problems and pushed output to around 90 horsepower. That combination made 1932-34 Fords the founding platform of American hot rodding.
The 1963 Ford Galaxie 500XL offered buyers a spread of engines topped by an all-new 427-cubic-inch V8, built specifically to exploit NASCAR’s newly raised displacement limit. The rarest version, a dual-carburetor 425-horsepower R-code, saw fewer than 3,900 examples built for the entire model year. That combination of race-bred engineering and genuine scarcity makes surviving R-code Galaxies among the most valuable full-size Fords ever built.
Built during Cadillac’s 50th-anniversary year in 1952, the Series 62 accounted for a record share of the brand’s total sales that year. This example, dressed in the era’s gold anniversary trim, now runs a 4.6-liter Northstar V8 in place of its original 331-cubic-inch engine. It’s a rare pairing of golden-anniversary styling with a drivetrain from decades later.
This 1936 Chevrolet pickup started life with a modest inline-six and three-speed manual, part of a lineup that introduced hydraulic brakes and an all-steel cab that year. Somewhere along the way it was reborn with a 383 small-block V8 and a Turbo 350 automatic. The swap turns a Depression-era work truck into a driver capable of keeping up with modern traffic.
This cream-and-orange Grand Marquis is actually a mid-1980s example, built on Ford’s long-running rear-wheel-drive Panther platform shared with the Crown Victoria and Lincoln Town Car (badged Continental until 1981). Under the hood is a fuel-injected 5.0-liter V8 tuned for smooth cruising rather than speed. Its size, comfort, and old-school construction made it a favorite with fleets and traditionalists alike.
The Ferrari Testarossa’s flat-12 engine sat mounted behind the cabin in a near-perfect 60/40 weight distribution, producing a claimed 390 horsepower in European trim, among the most powerful engines on any production car when it launched in 1984. Those famous side strakes were not styling flourishes, they fed air to radiators mounted in the car’s wide rear flanks to keep that engine cool. Production ran largely unchanged through 1991, with total output most commonly cited at 7,177 units. This 1988 example captures the model near the height of its seven-year run.