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A restored red 1972 Plymouth Barracuda looks the part, but 1972 was the year Chrysler’s biggest engines vanished from the order sheet entirely. The Hemi and the 440 Six-Pack were both gone, leaving the 340 as the top option at 240 horsepower under the new SAE net standard. Production fell hard, and the heavy-duty hardware disappeared alongside the engines. Read on to find out what changed and why the last E-bodies still matter.
Bobby Alloway brought this 1965 Buick Riviera to the 2016 SEMA Show looking almost stock from twenty feet away, which is exactly the trick. Underneath the unchanged sheet metal sits a Chevrolet 502 big block, a Tremec five-speed, an Art Morrison front clip, and Billet Specialties wheels measuring 19 inches front and 22 rear. The original Nailhead V8 is nowhere to be found. Read on to find out what makes this build work.
This bright green Dodge Charger hides an 800-horsepower Procharged Hemi and a subwoofer-equipped interior — built, per commenters, by the owner himself. 1320video catches the car running Colorado Springs Airport’s runway at the 2017 Pikes Peak Airstrip Attack. Viewers call the owner a badass for actually driving it instead of trailering a build this serious. Watch to see what a real daily-driven, 800-horsepower Hemi can do.
This clean California 1966 Chevrolet El Camino wears a Chip Foose-inspired paint scheme and 17-inch Torque Thrust wheels over a 327 backed by an automatic. The 1966 model year mattered for the El Camino because Chevrolet restyled the Chevelle it was built on and, more importantly, finally made the 396 big block available. Production climbed past 35,000 units. Read on to find out what made this the year the formula finally worked.
This Bolero Red 1967 Camaro convertible wears the Rally Sport package, which bought hidden headlamps and extra brightwork and precisely zero additional horsepower. Underneath sits the 327 Turbo-Fire V8, rated at 275 horsepower and quick enough to make the point without a big-block badge. Only a small fraction of RS Camaros that year were convertibles. Read on to find out why the mid-range V8 drop-top is the combination collectors quietly prefer.
Springtime Yellow paint makes this 1967 Mustang Fastback look cheerful, which undersells what Ford actually changed that year. The 1967 model was the first significant redesign of the Mustang, wider and longer specifically to make room for a big block, and it was also the last year for the legendary K-code 289. Ford built just over 71,000 fastbacks that year against nearly half a million Mustangs total. Read on to find out what makes the fastback the one enthusiasts chase.
Barely more than a hundred buyers ordered a 426 Hemi in their 1967 Dodge Charger, which is exactly why Dodge occasionally sent one to the auto show circuit instead of a customer. The Street Hemi was rated at 425 horsepower and cost roughly a quarter of the car’s base price on its own. Add the Charger’s own weak sales that year and the survivors become genuinely scarce. Read on to find out what made this combination so hard to sell.
For 1970 only, Chevrolet let a mid-size Chevelle carry a higher factory horsepower rating than any Corvette on the order sheet. The LS6 454 was rated at 450 horsepower, and just 4,475 SS454 LS6 Chevelles were built across every body style. Historians estimate as few as 20 to 25 were convertibles. Read on to find out what made this Cortez Silver drop-top one of the rarest Chevelles ever built.
The 1969 Shelby GT500 carried a 428 Cobra Jet rated at 335 horsepower, a figure almost nobody believed then and nobody believes now. It was also the last Shelby Mustang Carroll Shelby had any real hand in, built during the year he walked away from the program entirely. Ford ended up re-titling hundreds of leftover cars as 1970 models under federal supervision. Read on to find out what makes this generation the one collectors argue about most.
Line up a 1968 Charger R/T, a 1965 Shelby GT350R, a 1969 Camaro SS and a 1969 Mustang Mach 1 and you are not looking at four takes on one idea. You are looking at four manufacturers answering the same question in completely incompatible ways, at the exact moment none of them were holding back. Each one won a different argument, and all four are still blue-chip names today.
In 2017, the final model year for the Dodge Viper, driver Dominik Farnbacher took the track-focused ACR-Extreme around the Nurburgring Nordschleife and posted an official lap of 7:03.45, one of the fastest times ever recorded by a car under $400,000. No turbo, no hybrid assist, just a naturally aspirated V10 and a manual gearbox. Watch the full lap that closed out the Viper’s legacy.
A 1973 Plymouth Barracuda could never have left the factory with a 426 Hemi under the hood, because Chrysler had already killed the engine two years earlier. That makes this performance-built tribute car something other than a fake, and Mopar collectors have long treated cars like it as legitimate in their own right. Behind the Hemi sits a 727 TorqueFlite, a Dana 60 with 4.11 gears, and Wilwood discs. Read on to find out why the combination works.
Jack Chrisman’s 1965 Mercury Comet — the altered-wheelbase car credited with launching NHRA’s fuel Funny Car division — turns up on static display at the 2017 Southeast Gassers Association Knoxville event, owned by the family behind Barillaro Speed Emporium. One commenter adds firsthand history, having grown up at Lions and Irwindale and even met Chrisman’s son. See the car that made stock-bodied Mercury look deceptively ordinary.
This 1963 Mercury Comet was bought new at a Tyler, Texas dealership in May 1963 and driven by the same owner into her nineties, accumulating just 45,000 miles along the way. What makes it genuinely uncommon is not the mileage but the order sheet: a base sedan optioned with both the 260 V8 and air conditioning, a combination almost nobody chose. Read on to find out why that pairing was so rare and what it means today.
This show-quality 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air has covered just 42 miles since its restoration, and almost nothing under the skin is what General Motors installed. A 1969 Corvette 350 replaced the original small block, an overdrive automatic sits where a Powerglide once did, and the car now stops on power front discs it never had. The result is a Tri-Five that looks period-correct and drives like it was built this decade. Read on to find out what changed and why it matters.