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Tim Allen opens up his private garage for GQ’s Car Collectors series, and it’s less a display of exotics than a decades-deep collection of authentic American iron — including a 1965 Shelby Cobra S/C and a 1933 Ford Roadster he built himself during Home Improvement’s run. Watch to see why this collection reflects the man more than the market.
A rotted-out 1970 Dodge Challenger becomes Project Ultra Violet in this POWERNATION Detroit Muscle build. The crew brings in chassis builder Jeff Schwartz for a full-frame conversion, grafts in a low-deck aluminum Hemi and a Tremec six-speed, and finishes it off with metallic purple paint and graphics from builder Chris Ryan. Watch to see how a shell most shops would have scrapped becomes a genuinely modern resto-mod.
A vintage road test puts a 1969 Dodge Charger 500 — Dodge’s NASCAR homologation special, built to fix the standard Charger’s high-speed aerodynamics — through its paces with the 426 Hemi under the hood. Announcer Bud Lindeman narrates in period broadcast style, and the comments are full of viewers’ own Hemi street stories. Watch to hear the line that’s still quoted decades later.
Ford’s 1962 Thunderbird Sports Roadster used a clever fiberglass tonneau cover to disguise a genuine four-seat convertible as a two-seat sports car, right down to spoke wire wheels and special fender badges. Check the right option box and Ford would add Tri-Power carburetion to the 390 V8, bumping output to a genuine 340 horsepower — but only 120 buyers ever did, out of 1,427 Sports Roadsters built that year. Historians estimate barely 40 of those M-code cars survive today, making this one of the rarest factory options of the entire early Thunderbird generation.
Chevrolet’s Mark IV big-block started as a truck engine and ended up terrorizing quarter-miles from Camaros to full-size Biscaynes. The 396, the 402 sold under a different name, and the legendary 427 all trace back to the same basic architecture. Read on to see how one engine family covered such wildly different cars.
Ford built an engine so large it needed a redesigned front end just to fit under a Mustang’s hood — and only built it at all because of a NASCAR homologation rule. Fewer than 1,400 Boss 429s were ever made, each one tagged with a sequential Kar Kraft door number. Read on for how a 375-horsepower rating hid an engine capable of 600-plus, and why this remains one of the most valuable Mustangs Ford ever sold.
This pale yellow 1964 Ford Galaxie, with its red vinyl bucket seats and chrome-heavy face, looks like exactly the comfortable family hardtop Ford sold it as. But the same model line quietly carried the 427 and, briefly, the 600-plus-horsepower SOHC ‘Cammer’ that Ford never dared sell to the public. Read on for how the Galaxie evolved year by year into the 7 Liter, and why a small number of these ordinary-looking cars may be hiding something extraordinary.
The same Ford flathead V8 sits under the hood of both a glossy black ’32 Phaeton and a working maroon late-1930s pickup, wearing the same chrome V8 badge either way. Its single-piece ‘monoblock’ casting solved a flaw that plagued earlier V8 engines, and it became the foundation of the postwar hot rod movement. Read on for how lake pipes, relieving, and Ardun heads turned a Depression-era workhorse engine into a performance icon.
A 1969 Camaro Z/28, built for road racing rather than raw power, lines up against a 1968 Chevelle SS built around old-fashioned big-block torque, at Palm Beach International Raceway. It is Chevrolet against itself, two completely different engineering philosophies from the same manufacturer settling an argument muscle car fans have never stopped having. Watch to see which approach wins this particular pass.
This 1970 Mercury Cyclone GT was built to be crushed. As a factory pilot car used to validate Mercury’s production line, its entire purpose ended the moment testing wrapped up, most cars in this role never survive to see a public road. This one did, and it came loaded with the Super Cobra Jet package: a 375-horsepower 429 V8, four-speed manual, and 4.30 gears built for straight-line speed. Watch to find out how a car that was never meant to exist ended up in the Brothers Collection decades later.
High Tech Corvette put a nearly 1,000-horsepower C7 Z06 up against a purpose-built Chevy Nova in a straightforward roll race, and the result was not the foregone conclusion the horsepower gap suggests. Viewers who expected the modern Corvette to walk away were surprised by how close it actually was. Watch to see which car takes it.
A roll race across a bridge between a 2010 Camaro SS/RS and a 1972 Chevelle big-block should have been a formality – decades of engineering separate the two cars. Instead, four words in the original upload told the whole story: Chevelle won. The unscripted footage has since raked in over 1.4 million views and sparked an ongoing old-vs-new debate in the comments. Find out what gave the fifty-year-old Chevelle the edge.
Only two buyers in 1966 ordered a Ford 7-Litre convertible with the dual-carburetor R-Code 427 instead of the standard 428 — and this Brothers Collection car is one of them. Muscle Car Of The Week digs into what actually separates the R-Code’s cross-bolted big block from the ordinary version riding under most 7-Litre badges. Watch to see why this one stopped the crew in their tracks.
This 1970 Chevelle spent 35 years parked in the Dallas area, and what’s underneath the dust is about as good as barn finds get — a factory Tuxedo Black LS6 454 rated at 450 horsepower, backed by the desirable M22 ‘Rock Crusher’ four-speed. It’s exactly the combination Chevelle collectors call a holy grail. Watch to see what three and a half decades of dormancy did to one of the rarest muscle cars GM ever built.
This 1969 Dodge Charger R/T pairs the factory-rated 425-horsepower 426 Hemi with a rare 3-speed automatic transmission, a combination found in only a few hundred of the more than 20,000 Charger R/Ts built that year. Part of the Brothers Collection, it carries just over 50,000 original miles. Watch to see what made this specific combination so unusual.