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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.
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.
In 1969 Chevrolet let a handful of buyers order an all-aluminum, race-bred 427 that needed fuel no gas station actually sold — and it nearly doubled the price of the car it went into. Only 69 Camaros and 2 Corvettes ever left the factory with the ZL1 option. Read on for the dyno numbers, the drag strip runs that outran them, and why this engine’s window of availability was so brief.
NHRA’s 50 Greatest Drivers list wasn’t slapped together as clickbait – it came out of a genuine blue-ribbon panel debate for the sanctioning body’s 50th anniversary, weighing everything from national event wins to the sport’s technological history. Don Garlits sits at number one, with John Force, Don Prudhomme, Bob Glidden, and Shirley Muldowney rounding out a top five that basically built modern drag racing. Decades later, NHRA even expanded it into a Top 75 list for its 75th anniversary. So who’s your pick for the top spot?
This 1970 Ford Torino King Cobra prototype was built to fight Chrysler’s aerodynamic NASCAR cars, wrapping an extended nose around the race-bred Boss 429 V8 before NASCAR’s rule changes killed the entire program. Only a handful of these prototypes were ever built, making this one of the rarest Fords in existence. Take a detailed look at a car that came remarkably close to reaching Ford showrooms before the aero wars ended.
Most 1957 Thunderbird buyers never knew Ford quietly built America’s first production supercharged V8 that same year. Roughly 200 F-code cars left the factory rated at 300 horsepower — though Paxton itself claimed the real number was closer to 360. Here’s the story behind Ford’s rarest personal luxury car of the decade.
