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Read the phrase 1966 Corvette with a 454 big-block and any Corvette historian is going to stop and reread it, because Chevrolet did not build a 454 until 1970. That does not make the car uninteresting; it makes it a different story than the badge suggests. The real 1966 big-block news was a brand-new 427, and the numbers behind it are worth the detour. Read on to find out what was actually available.
Genuine 1970 Plymouth Superbirds are nearly impossible to find and even harder to afford, so this build started from a Plymouth Satellite instead and became a hand-crafted tribute complete with the aero car’s iconic nose cone and towering rear wing. Featured on Muscle Car of the Week, it lives in The Brothers Collection alongside vintage NASCAR racers and bone-stock originals. Watch to see how close a tribute build can get to the real thing.
When Mikey V’s father, a former American Motors employee, asked his son to choose between a Hornet and a Javelin, the answer became this 1972 AMC Javelin SST, now built to make an estimated 900 horsepower and still driven as a daily commuter whenever weather allows. At Wisconsin’s World of Wheels show, viewers praised the build for keeping genuine AMC power instead of a common big-block swap. See how a father’s question turned into one of AMC’s wildest daily drivers.
The 1969 Pontiac GTO Judge took its name from a television catchphrase and was originally conceived as a cheaper GTO to fight the Road Runner. What Pontiac actually released was the loudest car in its showroom: exclusive paint, bold striping, a rear spoiler nobody could miss, and Ram Air power. Only 6,833 were built that first year. Read on to find out what it takes to push a car like that even further.
A 1969 Chevelle SS 396 and a 1987 Buick GNX are separated by eighteen years and two completely opposed ideas about how to build a fast car. One answers with cubic inches and a big-block soundtrack. The other answers with a turbocharged V6 that beat a Corvette to 60 mph and was almost certainly underrated from the factory. Here is why collectors keep arguing about which one actually wins.
Nobody could order a plain GT350 off a Ford dealer’s Mustang order sheet in 1969, because that badge belonged to Carroll Shelby’s operation and meant the car had been pulled out of the normal build process for serious modification. It also meant something else that year: this was the end. The 1969 cars were the last genuine Shelby Mustangs built new. Read on to find out what was actually bolted underneath the paint.
Only 17 Pontiac GTO Judge convertibles were built for the 1971 model year, and this white example, from The Brothers Collection, is one of them. A commenter details a sister car restored in Oregon with a 455, four-speed, and Super Duty upgrades. Others argue over which cars carried the rare Ram Air IV engine. Watch the full episode to see the wing and stripes that give it away.
This 1962 Chrysler New Yorker wears a 440 V8 that Chrysler hadn’t even invented yet when the car was built. Under an orange-and-purple flake paintjob sits air suspension, a locking differential, and side pipes loud enough to turn heads before the paint does. Read on to find out what the New Yorker actually left the factory with, and why a builder would swap it for an engine four years its junior.
The 1971 Corvette LT-1 lost forty horsepower on paper compared with the 1970 car, and it is the better buy because of it. Chevrolet dropped compression from 11.0:1 to 9.0:1 that year to meet a corporate low-lead fuel mandate, which is exactly why this is the last solid-lifter small block Corvette you can run on ordinary pump gas. Only 1,949 were built.
The 1971 Super Bee is the one that broke the pattern. After four years on the Coronet, Dodge moved the badge onto the Charger body for a single season and then killed it outright. Just 5,054 were built, and the ones fitted with the 440 Six Pack are counted in the dozens. This is the last Super Bee, and it was gone before most people realized it had changed shape.
Ford built the Boss 351 for a single model year in 1971, and Hot Rod Magazine later dyno-tested it at 383 horsepower, enough to outmuscle plenty of genuine big-blocks from the era. At the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals in Chicago, V8TV’s cameras caught up with one of these overlooked one-year wonders on display among the country’s rarest Mustangs and Corvettes. One commenter once found a genuine example rotting in a salvage yard for $2,650. See why this small-block still divides opinion.
Aston Martin’s DBS doesn’t look like a typical Aston — its squared grille and fastback tail borrowed more from American muscle car design than English tradition. That unusual shape hid a V8 upgrade in 1969 that briefly made it the fastest four-seat production car in the world, and a starring role as James Bond’s car the same year. Here’s how a British grand tourer ended up channeling Detroit.
A 1964 Pontiac Catalina Safari station wagon, spotted on the streets of Montreal, drew a comment from the person who actually built it years earlier, confirming the interior is untouched since the restoration. Commenters still cannot agree whether it carries a 389 or 421 V8. Watch the full walk-around and see why wagons deserve more credit in muscle car circles.
Plenty of 1967 Mustang fastbacks look completely factory at a cruise night and are hiding an engine Ford never built. The 408 stroker starts with a 351 Windsor block, opens the bores slightly, and swaps in a longer-throw crankshaft to reach 408 cubic inches — all while fitting in the same space a 289 once occupied. The result is one of the most effective sleeper combinations in the Ford world. Read on to find out how the recipe works and where two identical-looking builds end up in completely different places.
In late 1966, three brand-new Mustangs sat finished in Shelby American’s Los Angeles shop, all painted Candyapple Red: a coupe, a fastback, and a convertible. Two became the template for a production run. The third never did, because Ford shelved the convertible GT500 for a year, leaving exactly one 1967 example in existence — and Carroll Shelby kept it for himself. Read on to find out what happened to serial number 0139.