 |
1970 finally gave the Ford Ranchero its own identity — Ranchero or Ranchero GT badges on the glovebox instead of Fairlane or Torino script, plus a pointed grille, hideaway headlights, and coke-bottle styling that left the old body looking dated overnight. Four distinct trims rolled out that year, from the woodgrain Squire to a GT that could be ordered with a 370-horsepower 429 Cobra Jet. Here’s how Ford split its unibody truck-car into four very different personalities for one model year.
Pontiac built over 81,000 GTOs in 1967, but only a fraction of buyers walked out with a genuine 400 cubic inch V8 backed by a real Hurst-shifted 4-speed manual. This blue example carries that enthusiast-spec combination straight from a Gateway Classic showroom floor. It’s a reminder that the car credited with inventing the muscle car format still had levels of buyer commitment baked into the order sheet.
Ford built exactly 57 of these R-code Fairlanes in 1966, not for showroom sales, but to satisfy a NASCAR homologation rule requiring a minimum production run. Every one wore the same white-over-black color combination and hid a 427 side-oiler under a stripped-down interior. Only about 25 are believed to survive. Here is the story behind Ford’s rarest mid-size muscle car.
This 1956 Buick Special carries Buick’s famous Nailhead V8, a 322 cubic inch small-block nicknamed for its odd, undersized valves, paired with the smooth-shifting Dynaflow automatic. It was Buick’s value play for 1956, yet the engineering underneath punches well above its price class. Six decades later, the Nailhead is still a cult favorite among builders and collectors alike.
Chevrolet’s engineers had just fifteen weeks to turn the all-new 265 cubic-inch V8 from drawings into a running engine for 1955 – and it became the foundation for the small-block Chevy legacy that followed. This Bel Air, shared by Gateway Classic Cars, wears a later 350 CID V8 rather than its factory-original small block, continuing a Tri-Five swap tradition that goes back decades. See what made the 265 such a milestone and why this platform still dominates car shows.
Inspired by the same Motorama concept that spawned the Chevy Nomad, Pontiac’s 1955 Safari carried the brand’s highest price tag and its lowest production numbers, just 3,760 built. Find out how a flagship wagon became one of the rarest Pontiacs of its era, and what made its shared Nomad tooling such a bold move for GM.
This 1971 Chevelle wears LS6 tribute badges on a 454 big block, but Chevrolet’s own records show the real LS6 never actually reached production Chevelle buyers that year. Gateway Classic Cars captured this TM400-backed big block in a full photo set, from engine bay to interior to exterior stance. The story behind the engine option Chevy advertised and then quietly pulled says a lot about how fast the muscle car era was already changing.
NASCAR was so tired of losing to the Plymouth Superbird’s aerodynamic tricks that it rewrote the rulebook to ban cars like it. Built to lure Richard Petty back to Plymouth, this 440 Six Pack, four-speed Superbird carried him to eight wins in 1970 alone. With only around 1,920 to 1,935 ever built, a real numbers-matching Superbird remains one of the rarest, most historically loaded muscle cars in existence.
Pontiac built just 7,500 examples of the 1979 10th Anniversary Trans Am to mark a decade of the badge — and inside that already-limited run, only 1,817 buyers got the 400 cubic-inch V-8 paired with a 4-speed manual. That combination makes this silver-and-charcoal special one of the last true muscle-era Firebirds, built right before the fuel crisis changed everything.
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.