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Plymouth built roughly 41,000 Road Runners for 1970, down more than half from the year before, and only three of them were Hemi convertibles. One of those three went to Canada. This gallery captures a car from the model year when insurance underwriters, not engineers, finally decided how fast an American family could afford to go. Read on for what the Air Grabber hood was hiding and why so few buyers got to find out.
This 1938 Bugatti tribute wears the horseshoe grille and spoked wheels of one of the most famous race cars ever built, but its 1600cc four-cylinder engine gives away a secret most tribute builds share. With real Type 35s worth seven figures and fewer than 350 ever made, replicas like this one are usually built on far humbler underpinnings. Here’s what’s really hiding beneath the bodywork.
1953 marked the final year for Ford’s legendary flathead V8, a 239 cubic inch engine that had powered the brand for 21 years. This Customline, Ford’s mid-level trim slotted between the Mainline and Crestline, was one of 761,662 built that year. It’s a car that looked ordinary on paper but carried real automotive history under the hood. Here’s what made 1953 such a pivotal year for Ford’s V8 lineup.
At nearly 233 inches long, the 1977 Lincoln Continental Town Car was the largest mass-produced car sold anywhere in the world that year, beaten only by hand-built limousines almost nobody actually owned. It arrived just before Detroit abandoned cars of this size for good. Here’s what made this generation the last of its kind, and what was actually under the hood of the biggest sedan money could buy.
This 1967 Chevrolet C10 wears a 454 cubic-inch V8 that Chevy never actually offered in this body style, a serious departure from the truck’s factory roots as the first year of GM’s completely redesigned C/K lineup. See what made the ’67 redesign such a turning point for Chevy trucks, and how far a swap like this actually pushes it past stock.
1958 wasn’t just a facelift year for the Ford Fairlane, it was the debut of the FE engine family that would go on to define Ford performance for two decades. This particular car runs the mid-pack 332 V8, one of the two new FE engines, slotting above the carryover 292 Y-block base engine and below the range-topping 352 Interceptor. Here’s what made that engine lineup, and the reworked body it arrived in, worth remembering.
The 1956 Chevrolet 210 Handyman wagon never got the glory that the Bel Air or Nomad soaked up, but it shared the same tri-five platform and small-block V8 architecture that made those cars legends. Built for families who needed cargo room more than chrome, it’s quietly become one of the more interesting restoration finds from Chevrolet’s most transformative decade. Here’s why this overlooked wagon deserves a second look.
The original 1940 Ford Deluxe convertible came with a modest flathead V8 making just 85 horsepower – nothing like the 350 cubic inch engine and automatic transmission riding under this particular car’s hood. That mismatch tells its own story about how classic pre-war Fords survive as drivers instead of trailer queens. Here’s what Ford actually built in 1940, and why so many owners choose to swap it out.
This 1958 Pontiac Chieftain rolled off the line during the final season of a nameplate Pontiac had built since 1949, one year before an all-new Catalina made it obsolete. Under its restyled, honeycomb-grille body sat an air suspension and tri-power V8 borrowed from Pontiac’s priciest engineering ideas. Only a few thousand were built this way. Here’s what made the last Chieftain worth a second look.
1979 was the quiet send-off for an entire generation of Ford Thunderbird, closing out a body style that had grown larger and heavier through most of the decade. A restyled grille and new taillamps were the last visual changes before a much smaller Thunderbird arrived the following year. Buyers didn’t seem to notice, or mind — Ford sold well over a quarter-million of them anyway.
By 1979, Chevrolet’s El Camino was riding on Malibu-based, sharp-edged styling and offering a six-cylinder as its standard engine — a long way from the truck-car hybrid’s muscle car roots. A 350-cubic-inch V8 was still on the order sheet for buyers who wanted it, but this was the last year they’d get the chance. Here’s what was actually under the hood by the end of the decade.
Dodge invented the Super Bee by taking everything expensive out of a Coronet and leaving everything fast, then spent 1969 escalating the engine list until a 426 Hemi was sitting on the order form. Buried inside that model year was a package aimed at drag racers that Dodge barely advertised. This Gateway Classic Cars gallery captures the result. Read on for the option code that separates a good Super Bee from a great one.
The 1968 Dodge Hemi Dart was a factory fever dream — just 80 cars built with a raw 426 race Hemi and no warranty, capable of quarter-mile times in the 10-11 second range. This tribute Dart takes that same defiant spirit into Pro Street territory, a build style popularized in the 1980s that mimics a Pro Stock drag car while staying street legal. Tubbed rear ends, narrowed axles, and wheelie bars separate a true Pro Street car from an ordinary hot rod. Under this one’s hood sits a 605 cubic inch Hemi big block that dwarfs even the original Hurst-built cars.
The 1978 Lincoln Continental Town Coupe offered Ford’s largest available engine that year, a 460 cubic inch V8 making 210 horsepower — the last model year Lincoln offered it before dropping the option for 1979. Despite weighing over 4,600 pounds and costing nearly $10,000 new, the Town Coupe was outsold roughly five to one by Cadillac’s Coupe de Ville. A leisurely 11.6-second run to 60 mph made clear this was a cruiser built for comfort, not stoplight bragging rights. Surviving examples with the big-block intact are increasingly rare finds today.
Chrysler’s 1940 Windsor hid a clever transmission trick called Fluid Drive that let drivers forget the clutch at a stoplight, arriving almost the same year Oldsmobile’s true clutch-free Hydra-Matic reached the market – not years ahead of it. Wrapped in a freshly redesigned body with new sealed-beam headlights, this modest six-cylinder Mopar quietly punched above its price class. Then World War II froze the whole lineup mid-stride. Here’s the story behind an overlooked prewar Chrysler.