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This 1969 Shelby GT500 survived five decades without a repaint, an engine swap, or a re-upholstered seat, and crossed the block at the 2016 Auctions America Fall Collector Car Weekend still wearing everything it left the factory with. ScottieDTV frames the sale around a question every serious collector eventually faces: restore it back to showroom perfect, or leave it exactly as history left it. Cars this original don’t get a second chance at the decision. Watch what happened when the gavel came down.

The 1968 Camaro was Chevrolet’s second-year answer to a strong debut, refining the formula rather than reinventing it — and one of the biggest changes was tucked under the hood, not on the body panels. A big-block option that hadn’t existed the year before turned the Camaro into a genuine muscle car contender. Here’s what made 1968 a pivotal year for the model, radio or no radio.

This 1968 Pontiac Firebird has survived more than five decades with its factory 350 V8 and much of its original interior intact, a rarity in a hobby where most survivors have been repainted, swapped, or modified at least once. 1968 was also a quietly important year for the Firebird, the point where Pontiac refined the platform’s rough first-year edges with new glass, suspension, and available horsepower up to 320. The result is a car that’s both historically significant and remarkably unmolested.

Randy Smalley has owned his white 2005 Ford GT with blue stripes since it was new, and unlike a lot of owners who’ve kept their GTs parked as investments, he actually drives his. Lou Costabile caught up with him in the suburbs of Mesa, Arizona for a ride-along in what many Ford enthusiasts still call the best-looking car the company has ever built. Two decades on, this modern GT40 tribute is only becoming rarer to see used the way it was designed to be. Watch the full ride-along.

This 1970 Plymouth ‘Cuda AAR exists because of a rulebook, not a marketing plan. Plymouth had to sell thousands of street versions just to make its Trans-Am racecar legal to compete. Under the fiberglass hood is a 340 ‘Six Barrel’ V8 that Plymouth badged differently than Dodge’s identical engine, backed by a factory rating widely believed to undersell its real output. Only 2,724 were built, all within a single five-week window in early 1970. That narrow build window is exactly what makes cars like this Moulin Rouge example so sought after today.

Zora Arkus-Duntovs engineers built the LT-1 to match Chevrolets big-block power in a smaller, lighter package, earning it the nickname The Mouse That Roared. New emissions rules trimmed the 1971 version to 330 horsepower, but it still ran 0-60 in six seconds flat with a four-speed manual as the only transmission offered. Only 1,949 of that years Corvettes left the factory with it.

This Teal Fox-body Mustang did not stay stock for long. It went from a single turbo 6.0L LS swap to a forged 5.3L short block breathing through twin 76mm turbochargers, landing at roughly 1400 horsepower, nearly six times what this platform made from the factory in its hottest form. Builds like this show just how far the LS-swap movement has pushed Fox-body Mustangs beyond their original pushrod ceiling. It is a case study in how much power a compact V8 can handle with the right boost.

Plymouth’s 1959 Suburban lineup covered three distinct station wagons, a nine-passenger four-door, a six-passenger four-door, and a budget two-door with sliding rear windows, built on a 122-inch wheelbase. Combined Suburban production reached 120,802 units, about 26 percent of Plymouth’s total output that year. Under the hood, a 230.2-cubic-inch six made 132 horsepower, modest power wrapped in unmistakable Big Fin-era styling.

Only 472 Mustangs left the factory in 1967 with the high-performance 289 V8 under the hood, making this Wimbledon White convertible a genuine rarity rather than just another pretty color combination. The GT package that came with it wasn’t cosmetic — it required dual exhaust and forced buyers into the hottest engine Ford offered that year short of a big block. Here’s what actually separated a true 1967 GT 289 from the more common six-cylinder cruiser.

This 1970 Plymouth GTX in Tor Red paint pairs the rare 440 Six Barrel engine with a four-speed manual, a combination that found few buyers when new. Plymouth built only 678 GTXs with the Six Barrel option that year, split between automatic and manual transmissions, while the mechanically similar Road Runner outsold the GTX by more than five to one. Owner Tom Bright had been searching for this exact car for years.

The 1965 Shelby GT350 began as a homologation special, with Carroll Shelby building the first 100 street cars just to qualify the Mustang for SCCA B Production racing. Only 521 total examples were produced before Shelby softened the formula for 1966. Every GT350 wore Wimbledon White with Guardsman Blue stripes and hid a reworked 306-horsepower 289 V8 under its fiberglass hood scoop.

A genuine Ford GT-40 doesn’t often leave the show circuit, let alone line up against a modern Dodge Hellcat on an airstrip. At Omega Motorsport’s NoFlyZone Midwest event, that’s exactly what happened, and the result had little to do with which car had more horsepower on paper. The GT-40 was built in the 1960s to beat Ferrari at Le Mans, and some of that engineering still translates six decades later. See how a Le Mans legend handled a fight nobody expected it to win.

This 1956 Chevrolet pickup showed up to its pro touring build already carrying nearly every original factory panel, needing only a single small patch before the real work could begin. ScottieDTV caught it at the 24th annual Auto Crusade, where a period-correct exterior hides a chassis and interior built for serious daily driving, not just trailer duty. It’s a build that wins awards without ever losing the ability to actually get driven. See what’s hiding underneath that factory-look sheet metal.

The 1969 Mustang Fastback wasn’t just a facelift of the 1968 car — Ford renamed it, restyled it, and gave buyers five different engines to choose from, ranging from a mild six-cylinder to a 335-horsepower 428. Sixty-two thousand buyers picked this exact body style that year alone. Here’s what actually changed for 1969, and why the SportsRoof name still shows up in collector circles today.

A 1966 Corvette badged with a 454 raises an immediate question for anyone who knows the Corvette’s engine history: that displacement didn’t exist yet. What Chevrolet actually dropped into Corvettes for the first time in 1966 was arguably just as dramatic, and it changed the car’s reputation overnight. Here’s the real story behind the big-block Corvette’s debut year, and what a 454 badge on a ’66 more likely means.


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