Latest Posts Under: History
This vintage road test of a well-optioned 1971 Dodge Charger SE 440 comes from an era when television, not YouTube, brought muscle cars to audiences. Viewers in the comments identified the tester as the late Gordon Bud Lindemann, a hall-of-fame figure in automotive broadcasting. The footage doubles as both a car review and a piece of television history. Watch to see the Charger and the man who tested it.
The Corvair remains the only mass-produced, rear-engine, air-cooled car ever built by an American manufacturer, and for most of the 1960s it genuinely competed with the VW Beetle — even spawning a turbocharged Monza Spyder and a 180-horsepower turbo Corsa. Then a single book changed everything, and sales collapsed from more than 300,000 units a year to just 6,000. Read on for the full story of the Corvair’s rise and its rapid fall.
A 1964 Pontiac Catalina Safari that started life as a police wagon now runs a 468-cubic-inch Nelson Racing Engines big-block under the hood, turning the least glamorous body style in Detroit’s lineup into what The Drive’s BIG MUSCLE crew calls a tire-shredding monster. The comment section is already campaigning for a full season of wagon builds. Watch to see what convinced them.
A stock Dodge Challenger SRT8 and a numbers-matching 1970 340 Six Pack Challenger T/A run six straight quarter-mile races, swapping drivers for the final two to separate skill from machine. According to an owner of both cars, the SRT8 trapped 107 mph while the vintage T/A, running on a worn original transmission, hit 115.90 mph. See how a fifty-year-old sleeper kept pace with a modern factory performance car.
RamblinAround tracks down one of only 503 original 1969 Dodge Charger Daytonas ever built, still running its factory 440 V8 and finished in correct T5 Copper paint. The Daytona’s nose cone and rear wing were built to break NASCAR speed records, and did, forcing the sport to change its rules. Watch to see the winged Mopar that inspired decades of dream-car regret in the comments.
By 2014, the Dodge Charger SRT8 packed a 470-horsepower V8 and genuine track-ready braking into a car still priced around $30,000 — less than half what comparable European performance sedans cost at the time. Getting there took three model years of shared engineering with the Chrysler 300, a redesigned face, and an engine lineup that kept growing without ever changing the car’s basic bones. Read on to find out how this generation closed out with a genuine value argument, not just an attitude.
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.
A 1960 Ford Falcon doesn’t look like the kind of car that inspires cult devotion, yet Regular Car Reviews’ take on Robert McNamara’s “love-letter to bean-counting” has fans quoting its closing line years later. Between an Argentine cousin racing to 600 horsepower and an Australian descendant that became a turbocharged legend, this humble compact’s story reaches far beyond its stock inline-six. One viewer’s family memory of a steering wheel coming off on the Beltway says the rest.
Before the 426 Hemi became the engine everyone associates with the name, Dodge was quietly running two completely different cylinder head designs side by side through the 1950s — a genuine hemispherical head and a cheaper poly compromise, often wearing nearly identical badging. Telling them apart today comes down to details as small as a dimple stamped into a valve cover. Read on to find out how to actually identify which engine is under the hood.
Pontiac deleted the GTO’s hidden headlights for 1970, added a rear sway bar, and quietly offered an ultra-rare exhaust option that only 233 cars ever received. A year later, the Judge was gone entirely. Read on to see how the GTO’s final two model years handled the industry’s shift away from raw horsepower.