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This 1966 Ford F-100 Shortbed Fleetside cruising around Dallas carries a small fender badge that marks it as one of the earliest trucks built on Ford’s Twin I-Beam front suspension, a design that stayed in production under F-Series pickups for three decades. With a small-block Ford V8 and updated air conditioning, it is set up to be driven, not just admired. Read on to find out why two forged beams beat the solid axle everyone else was still using.
Chevrolet’s 1972 Nova SS shipped with a single 350-cubic-inch small-block rated at 200 net horsepower — a far cry from whatever combination is making this particular example claim 700 horsepower today. As the last Nova SS built before the muscle car era wound down, it’s become a favorite blank canvas for builders chasing numbers Chevrolet’s engineers never imagined. Read on to find out how a factory economy car became a supercharged monster.
A 1959 Cadillac convertible was already the most outrageous car on American roads, with the largest tailfins ever fitted to a production automobile. This one has been dropped onto an air-bag suspension, given an interior its builder calls a man cave of wheels, and finished in paint deep enough to stop a crowd. Read on to find out what makes the 1959 Series 62 convertible so rare, why Cadillacs dominate the custom cruiser scene, and what a bagged Caddy gives up to look this good.
A Plymouth engineered to win NASCAR races before it ever had to satisfy a single customer, this 1970 Road Runner Superbird hides a nineteen-inch nose cone and a factory explanation that wasn’t the real one. At the Volo Auto Museum, director Brian Grams walks through the Alpine White, 440-powered example on camera, tracing the aero-war engineering Plymouth built in genuinely limited numbers before NASCAR changed the rules for good. The scoops, the wing, and the vinyl top all had a job to do.
John Hennessey’s shop strapped a Shelby GT350R to the dyno wearing its new HPE850 supercharger package, running on Shell V-Power 93 octane, and posted a pull that added 311 rear-wheel horsepower and 193 lb-ft of torque over the car’s naturally aspirated baseline. The resulting graph, a dual-scale readout where the horsepower and torque curves cross around 7,400 rpm, briefly confused viewers before the final number sank in. Watch the pull to see what boosting a flat-plane-crank Voodoo V8 actually looks like on the rollers.
This 1966 Dodge Coronet claims to be one of just seventeen 426 Hemi cars ever built — a number worth digging into before you take it at face value. Mopar’s own Hemi Coronet production records are murkier than you’d expect. Here’s what the real numbers say, and why it barely matters once you hear it run.
No-prep racing strips away the safety net of a perfectly prepped track and dares drivers to make it work anyway, and this chopped-top Chevy Nova wagon is built for exactly that kind of chaos. A 632-cubic-inch big-block and two nitrous kits totaling a 600 shot turn a family hauler into a launch that shakes the grandstands. Swamp Thing and crew took it to No Prep Mayhem in Wichita to race the biggest names in the format. Read on to see why a wagon belongs there.
The 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air did not just sell well, it kicked off the Tri-Five era that is still shaping how enthusiasts build cars seventy years later. A new 265 cubic inch small-block V8 earned it the nickname The Hot One, and Chevrolet sold roughly 1.7 million cars that year on the strength of it. This Pro Street build takes that formula to its logical extreme with tubbed rear fenders, a raked stance, and a drivetrain built to run. Read on to find out why the ’55 became the canvas of choice.
1957 was the last year for Ford’s original two-seat Thunderbird, and it went out with its best sales year yet at 21,380 built. Buried in that number is a rare F-code variant, a factory-supercharged Y-block making a rated 300 to 340 horsepower, with barely 200 or so built, the first handful of them purely to homologate the engine for NASCAR racing. Whether this particular Thunderbird hides that same blower under its hood is a question worth asking.
Shawn Ellington’s Murder Nova, a 1969 Chevy built around a Proline Racing big-block, is one of the most recognized cars in grassroots drag racing. At Lights Out 7, one of small-tire racing’s biggest proving grounds, the Nova pushed all the way to the semifinal round, silencing anyone who doubted a TV personality’s car could actually run with dedicated racers. Read on for how a kid from Sayre, Oklahoma built a name that still means something at the track.
Zora Arkus-Duntov built five secret Grand Sport racers to take on Shelby’s Cobras, and General Motors shut the program down before it could finish the job. This widebody 1965 Corvette Sting Ray track car picks up that fight decades later, starting from the first Corvette generation with standard four-wheel disc brakes and the year the big block first arrived. Read on to find out what it takes to build the track Corvette Chevrolet was never allowed to sell.
Ford discontinued the 429 Cobra Jet after 1971, and by 1972 tightening emissions rules had wiped both that big-block and the Boss 351 off the Mach 1 order sheet entirely, leaving the 351 Cleveland as the biggest engine on the menu. So why does this Screaming Yellow ’72 Mach 1 have a 429 under the hood? Read on to see the two explanations, and what it would take to prove which one is true.
Every 1970 Chevelle SS 396 badge tells a small lie, and the parenthetical in this convertible’s own description gives it away. The 396 that year was really a 402, bored out for reasons that had nothing to do with power, and Chevrolet kept the old emblem anyway. This 350-horsepower drop-top adds bucket seats, tilt wheel, air conditioning, and a power top to the story. Read on to find out why the badge and the engine stopped matching.
A twin-turbo C6 Corvette makes its power in a wave rather than a switch, and this build was putting that character to use on both the street and the track. Turbo C6s range from mild 700-horsepower street cars to record-setting builds past 1,300 horsepower, but the real work happens in the brakes, suspension, and cooling that keep the car composed lap after lap. Read on to find out what separates a fast turbo Vette from one that survives a full day at the circuit.