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From the mid-1950s through the 1970s, street racers ruled the boulevard, the drive-in, and the local dragstrip, marking their best times in shoe polish on the windshield for the whole school to see. Crashes, license suspensions, and new laws eventually ended the era, but a surprising number of cars survived, quietly passed down to children and grandchildren who still race them today. Read on to find out where this culture actually played out.
The 1970 Hemi ‘Cuda shares its basic body with a car Plymouth once sold as sensible transportation, and yet it routinely outruns period Ferraris at auction. The reason is not styling, and it is not nostalgia. It comes down to a single option box that almost nobody checked, a production number small enough to memorize, and an engine Chrysler built for the racetrack first. Here is the whole story.
Jay Leno had one thing left on his automotive bucket list: a ride in the Hurst Hemi Under Glass with legendary stunt driver Bob Riggle at the controls. What happened on that run turned a routine exhibition into one of the most-watched clips in Jay Leno’s Garage history, with nearly eight million views and a comment section full of people who could not believe what they had just watched. Watch the video and see for yourself.
The first-generation Chevelle produced one of the rarest and most faked muscle cars General Motors ever built. Only 201 Z-16 Malibu SS 396 cars were assembled in 1965, roughly 75 are believed to survive, and their six-figure values have created an entire cottage industry of counterfeits. The reason the fakes fall apart has nothing to do with paperwork. Read on for how to read a real one, and what made the 1966 SS 396 different.
An estate sale, a numbers-matching V8 sitting on a stand in a garage, and a certified appraiser willing to put a hard number on all of it — that’s the setup behind this 1968 Buick GS 400 out of Port Huron, Michigan. AutoAppraise’s Jason Phillips values the car at $35,000 after tallying over $20,000 in documented drivetrain work alone, but it’s the low, bellowing idle that keeps pulling viewers back years later. Is a scarce, correctly-matched GS400 actually the smartest buy in 1968 muscle?
A 2009 Chevrolet Malibu and a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air were aimed straight at each other at the same speed as part of an IIHS fiftieth anniversary demonstration, and the result hit viewers harder than a routine crash test had any right to. One car crumpled the way engineers designed it to. The other barely moved at the nose, and that was exactly the problem. Watch to see why a fifty-year-old safety statistic still makes people flinch.
This Granada Gold 1967 Camaro SS396 convertible, built for V8TV’s 50th-anniversary Camaro coverage, marks the exact mid-year moment Chevrolet finally let the 396 big block into the Camaro — a full two years after it debuted in the Impala SS. Host Kevin Oeste and The Brothers Collection dig into why the engine was late, and viewers’ own decades-old ownership stories fill in the rest.
The Brothers Collection’s 1969 Pontiac GTO Judge convertible carries a claim few muscle cars can match: it’s believed to be the last drop-top Judge Pontiac built for the entire model year. Host Kevin Oeste digs into the Ram Air III 400, the correct late-production color, and the small originality details that back up the story. One viewer’s decades-old memory of spotting this exact color as a kid says just as much about the car as the spec sheet does.
AMC spent forty million dollars and a million man-hours over three years before anyone outside the company saw the Hornet, then sold the base model for $1,994. It was the first American car with reinforced door beams, the first to offer a hatchback in its class, and the first to sell a designer interior. It also produced a 285-horsepower muscle car that only 784 buyers ever got. Read on for what killed it before it started.
Pontiac’s 326 was actually a 336 and the 350 that replaced it in 1968 was really a 354.74, which nobody at the division ever adequately explained. The G3 LeMans carried that engine through some of the best years of the A-body, picked up big valve Ram Air heads for 1969, and by 1970 could be ordered with GTO-sized engines in a cheaper package. Read on for the LeMans years worth knowing, including the budget hardtop Chevrolet undercut within weeks.
Shot as a period road test rather than a modern retrospective, this vintage clip follows a 1969 AMC AMX putting up numbers that still turn heads: 425 foot-pounds of torque and a 6.3-second 0-to-60 run. Built in far smaller numbers than its Big Three rivals, and equipped here with AMCs performance-focused Go package, this AMX makes the case that the smallest of Detroits manufacturers built a genuine giant killer. Watch the full period footage to see why AMC enthusiasts still wont let this car be forgotten.
Enzo Ferrari reportedly called it the most beautiful car ever made, and the Museum of Modern Art keeps one in its permanent collection, which is not something most sports cars can claim. The Series I E-Type ran from 1961 to 1968 on a 3.8 liter twin-cam six with triple SU carburetors, and the earliest cars have identifying details worth serious money. Read on for what separates a flat-floor car from everything that followed.
Plymouths fuselage-era Fury, produced from 1969 through 1973, gets its own spotlight here, and the comment section has turned into something like a family reunion. Viewers trade specific memories of mothers Autumn Copper Sport Furys, grandmothers 440-powered two-doors, and drivers ed cars with back seats “like a limousine.” Its proof that not every beloved Mopar had to be built for the dragstrip. Watch the full styling breakdown and see which detail — including that famous hidden headlamp option — sparks your own memory.
A chance tip from a friend on the Hot Rod Power Tour led to this overgrown Gulf Coast yard full of forgotten Dodge Challengers, slowly disappearing into the undergrowth after years of neglect. Some parts have already gone on to support other Mopar restorations, while the rest keep decaying where they sit. See what’s left of this hidden E-body stash before nature reclaims it completely.
The 1973 El Camino was the biggest one Chevrolet had ever built, and it arrived carrying federally mandated bumpers that nobody had designed the styling around. Underneath sat a raft of genuinely thoughtful engineering: a wider track with deliberately mismatched camber for crowned roads, computer-designed coil springs matched to each vehicle, standard front discs, and a 22-gallon tank. Read on for what the fourth generation got right in the worst possible decade for performance.