 |
The ‘Unicorn C5’ twin-turbo Corvette already put down 980 horsepower on the dyno once, then spent three months getting torn apart, rebuilt, and delayed by broken parts before the team at 1320video could chase the number again. Tucking a pair of turbochargers into a C5’s notoriously tight engine bay is never simple, and this build proves it. The team found a few more horsepower along the way and plans to push it further still.
Steve Brody’s 1964 Pontiac GTO convertible scored 997 out of 1,000 points at judging – fitting for the car most historians credit with starting the entire muscle car era. Pontiac’s team built it around a GM displacement loophole, and sales managers were so unsure of demand they capped the first run before realizing they’d underestimated buyers by a wide margin. Here’s the real story behind the car that started it all.
Not every muscle car story needs a famous name attached – this small-block Chevy V8 build is built around something simpler: a dad, his son, and a car that’s more about bringing a crew together than chasing horsepower records. Here’s why builds like this one still matter as much as the six-figure survivors.
By 1972, Oldsmobile’s 4-4-2 had been quietly demoted from its own model to an option code, built on its final A-body convertible platform before a full redesign eliminated the body style. Only a small fraction of that year’s 4-4-2-optioned Cutlasses were convertibles, and fewer still carried the top W-30 455 engine package. Here’s how rare the combination actually turned out to be.
Chevrolet dropped its first real big-block into the Corvette in 1966, and the numbers on paper barely tell the whole story. GM quietly underrated the top engine to keep insurance companies calm. Here’s what made the 427-powered ’66 Sting Ray one of the most significant Corvettes Chevrolet ever built, and why so few came off the factory floor exactly like this one.
Pontiac built three distinct versions of the same basic V8 for the 1970 Grand Prix, aimed at three different kinds of buyers — including one specifically detuned for people worried about their insurance bill. Total production that year came in at roughly half of the previous model year. Here’s how the Grand Prix lineup tried to serve very different priorities at once.
Chevrolet sold 777,000 Impalas in 1969, making it America’s best-selling car that year, and this Custom Coupe survivor carries an oddball spec: a 265-horsepower 396 that was somehow rated lower than the 350 in the same lineup, yet cost more to order. Riding on its original 1969 Texas plates with a stout 12-bolt rear end, this full-size cruiser has a stranger story than its badge suggests. Read on to find out why GM built an engine that looks like a mistake on paper.
Big Chief’s new Crowmod wasn’t just a replacement for his wrecked LeMans – it was a full rebuild around a twin-turbo Pontiac engine that survived that crash, wrapped in a lighter 1968 Firebird body. Taking it straight to Lights Out meant getting a brand-new combination race-ready under serious time pressure. Here’s the story behind one of drag radial racing’s most recognizable Pontiacs.
This Tahoe Turquoise 1966 Ford Mustang convertible carries the 76B Pony interior package, a 225-horsepower 289 four-barrel, factory wire hubcaps, and a power top — nearly every option a 1966 convertible buyer could check. Ford sold over 72,000 Mustang convertibles that year, more than double its nearest rival. Read on to find out exactly what made the Pony interior worth the extra money.
This black 1967 Chevrolet Chevelle SS 396 trades its factory bias-plys for drag radials, and the difference shows the moment the light turns green. Chevrolet built 63,006 SS 396s that year across three engine options, topping out at a rare 375-horsepower L78 that only 612 buyers managed to order. The SS 396 package brought disc brakes, red-stripe tires, and unmistakable styling to the table, but it’s the modern tire upgrade that finally lets this big-block put its factory torque to real use.
Barn-find hunter Ryan Brutt tracked down a Midwest barn holding several of the rarest cars in muscle car history — a Plymouth Superbird, Dodge Charger Daytona, Charger 500, Ford Torino Talladega, and Mercury Cyclone, all products of NASCAR’s brief and furious late-1960s aero wars. Most haven’t moved in decades. See exactly what’s sitting behind that barn door.
This chopped, chrome-heavy 1950 Cadillac street rod is built on the same Series 62 platform that carried Cadillac’s groundbreaking new V8 into showrooms that year. Today it runs a modern 6.2 liter engine making over 500 horsepower. Here is what made the original Cadillac V8 such a big deal, and how far this build has taken it.
A stock-looking late-model Mustang that pushes past 1,400 horsepower and still gets driven to Starbucks sounds like a car-guy tall tale, but this Hellion Turbo build makes it real. Running sub-9-second quarter miles while staying fully streetable, no trailer required, it’s the kind of sleeper build that earns respect at the track and stays completely invisible everywhere else. And the person behind the wheel embarrassing unsuspecting cars at the light? The Hellion Turbo owner’s own wife.
Mike O’Toole nearly sent this Tahoe Turquoise 1966 Mustang hardtop to the junkyard before deciding to restore it instead. It’s a survivor from a model year when Ford built over 607,000 Mustangs and hardtops made up more than 80 percent of them – a production pace that helped the Mustang claim over 7 percent of the entire U.S. car market. Here’s what made 1966 such a pivotal year for Ford’s pony car.
This award-winning 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air wears a custom Blue Heaven paint job, but the real story is under the hood. Chevrolet’s rare Rochester Ramjet fuel-injected 283 made 283 horsepower in 1957 — good for one horsepower per cubic inch — and only about 1,530 Bel Airs left the factory with it. That same engine got a Chevy sedan banned from NASCAR that year. Whatever’s powering this custom, it’s chasing a one-year-only legend.