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Jeff Fleming’s 1968 Dodge Charger R/T wears Medium Gold paint and a 426 Hemi under the hood — and after owning it since 2013, he’s brought it to a condition award judges keep recognizing. Lou Costabile sits down with Fleming on My Car Story to find out what it took to get a fifty-year-old Charger looking like it just rolled off the factory line. Watch the full conversation.
1976 was the last year Pontiac offered the mighty 455 V8 in the Trans Am, rated at a modest-sounding 200 horsepower after new emissions rules gutted the numbers Pontiac muscle was famous for. Here’s why this often-overlooked Trans Am still matters – as the final chapter of the 455’s long story and a genuine bookend to Pontiac’s entire big-block era, right before the option disappeared for good.
Pontiac stopped offering the 455 engine in 1976, meaning this 1978 Trans Am’s big-inch V8 isn’t a factory original, it’s the car’s numbers-matching 400 block, bored and stroked to 455 cubic inches during a full restoration. Edelbrock heads, a roller cam, and a rebuilt Quadrajet back up the added displacement. The result blends genuine muscle-era hardware with modern conveniences like Bluetooth audio.
This 1967 Yenko 427 Camaro carries the pedigree every Chevy fan recognizes — a Don Yenko dealer conversion built around Chevrolet’s 427 big block. But where most Yenkos were built to dominate the dragstrip, this one, pulled from the Brothers collection, was set up to cruise the highway instead. V8TV’s Kevin Oeste walks through what makes it different. Watch to see why this Yenko doesn’t play by the usual rules.
SpeedKore built this 1970 Dodge Charger around an engine that was never meant for the street: a 9.0-liter racing boat V8 from Mercury Marine, twin-turbocharged to 1,650 horsepower. It appeared in The Fate of the Furious and was later gifted to Vin Diesel as a birthday present, and has changed hands for as much as $699,000. Here’s how a marine engine ended up in a muscle car.
Mathieu Houtreille grew up under an Italian-car-loving father in Luxembourg but fell for American V8s instead, an obsession that eventually led him to an Ermine White 1965 Corvette Stingray — his exact preferred color — found through a collector’s ad months after he first spotted a C2 at Barrett-Jackson. It took one rain-soaked test drive at triple-digit speed to make the decision final. Some obsessions take years to find their match. See how this one ended.
The Plymouth Superbird’s absurd nose cone and towering wing weren’t styling choices, they were a NASCAR homologation requirement that forced Plymouth to build roughly 1,935 street cars nobody asked for. Only about 135 left the factory with the legendary 426 Hemi, making genuine Hemi Superbirds some of the most valuable muscle cars ever built. NASCAR banned the aero cars after just one season, leaving the Superbird a one-year wonder that still stops traffic today.
A 1968 Ford Mustang fastback is already one of the most iconic muscle car shapes ever built, so what happens when a pro-touring build throws out every 1968-era compromise underneath it? Modern stroker small-blocks, EFI, independent front suspension, and big brakes turn a beautiful old shape into something that can genuinely run with contemporary performance cars, at a cost that can climb into six figures. Here’s what actually separates a real pro-touring build from a fresh paint job.
Often credited as the car that invented the muscle car category, this Tiger Gold 1965 Pontiac GTO pairs the 389 V8 with a close-ratio four-speed, limited-slip differential, and upgraded brakes — an options sheet built for driving hard, not just showing off. V8TV’s Muscle Car of the Week series returns to the ’65 GTO because no two examples tell quite the same story. What would you have ordered on yours? Find out what makes this one different.
This 1968 Plymouth Satellite convertible arrived the same year Plymouth reshuffled its entire intermediate lineup, introducing the Sport Satellite as a new range-topping model over a freshly redesigned B-body. Under the hood could be anything from a mild 318 V8 to the 425-horsepower 426 Hemi that made Plymouth’s street cars famous. Only 136,136 Satellites were built for 1968, and convertibles remain the rarest survivors of the bunch.
Chevrolet built two half-car, half-truck oddballs three decades apart, and they couldn’t be more different under the skin. The 1970 El Camino SS could be ordered with a 450-horsepower LS6 454, while the 2004 SSR leaned on a 300-horsepower Corvette-sourced small-block wrapped in retro styling and a folding hardtop. One is a genuine muscle car, the other a low-production novelty. Here’s how they actually stack up.
1963 was the year Chevrolet’s Impala officially stepped out of the Bel Air’s shadow, becoming its own flagship model after the Bel Air Sport Coupe was discontinued, and it sold better than ever, moving roughly 832,600 units with 153,271 SS packages. This particular car keeps its original four-speed manual, a genuine rarity on a full-size Chevy from an era when most big-block buyers checked the automatic box instead. With upgrades kept mostly under the surface and nothing custom beyond the interior, it’s a clean, honest example of Chevrolet’s breakout year.
Pontiac did not just restyle the Bonneville for 1959, it reengineered the entire platform around a five-inch-wider Wide Track chassis designed to sharpen handling, an idea that would define the brand for the next fifty years. The convertible added Strato-Star styling, twin-fin fenders, and a windshield nearly 40 percent larger than before, with only 11,426 built that year. Under the hood, buyers could choose a 389 cubic-inch V8 rated anywhere from 215 to 345 horsepower. It’s one of the most significant single-year redesigns in Pontiac’s history.
A stock 1965 C10 could be ordered with a modest six-cylinder or a brand-new 327 V8, riding on a suspension design that was still fairly new to Chevy trucks. Bertha, slammed and supercharged, is a very different animal from what left the factory that year. Here’s what the factory version actually offered, and how far a build like this has pushed past it.
David Freiburger forgot he owned this 1970 Plymouth Duster, which sat neglected on a grape farm for years until a spare 440 Mopar big-block gave him a reason to remember. With five days on the clock, the Roadkill crew set out to drag it from the dirt to a smoking, driving muscle car. The build involves homemade headers, a cobbled exhaust, and just enough bodywork to get by. Watch to see whether the Crop Duster survives the week.