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This 1969 Chevelle looks like a clean pro-touring build until you notice the pair of 76mm turbochargers feeding an all-aluminum 540-cubic-inch big block. Underneath sits a Roadster Shop chassis and Detroit Speed suspension, because a fifty-six-year-old body shell cannot handle this kind of power on factory bones. The combination points to four figures of horsepower in a car that still wears its original silhouette. Read on to find out what it takes to build one.
A viral compilation of street racers colliding with police, some clips pure comedy, others carrying real consequences, has racked up over 11 million views and just as many arguments in the comments. One driver challenges an unmarked Dodge Challenger without realizing it. Another incident, a commenter says, ended in an eight-year prison sentence. Watch to see which moments are funny and which ones are not.
Ford built the Boss 302 engine to satisfy a rulebook, not a showroom, and almost everyone remembers the Mustang that carried it. Far fewer remember that Mercury put the same engine in a Cougar, wearing an Eliminator badge and built in numbers small enough that most enthusiasts have never seen one in person. Read on to find out why Mercury’s version stayed in the shadows.
Jeff Tittle kept his 1970 Chevrolet Nova looking exactly like the plain granny car it was built as, while quietly stuffing a 355 small block, a Super T-10 four speed, and a 9 inch Ford rear underneath. RamblinAround caught the car at a local show, and the moment it fires up, the sleeper act falls apart fast. Watch to hear just how much noise a car this unassuming can actually make.
By 1973 the muscle car era was supposed to be over, and Pontiac had not been told. That model year produced the Super Duty 455, an engine with four-bolt mains, forged rods, and dry-sump provisions wearing a production badge. It almost did not reach customers at all. Read on for what separated a real SD-455 from every other big-inch Firebird, and what a loud startup usually means underneath.
Ken Becker has owned this red-and-black 1956 Buick Special for twenty-five years, long enough that he describes it as a member of the family. The Special was the cheapest Buick you could buy, which makes it easy to overlook and wrong to dismiss. It carried a 322 nailhead V8, and its body style had helped introduce one of Detroit’s genuine styling breakthroughs. Read on for what the entry-level Buick got right.
Ford’s own paperwork undersold this 1969 Mustang GT the moment it left the factory. The 428 Cobra Jet carried an official 335-horsepower rating that engineers knew was fiction, chosen to keep the car out of the insurance industry’s crosshairs. Add a convertible body, a rare Indian Fire paint code, and a factory power top, and you have a combination Ford built fewer than thirty times. The registry that tracks them can confirm four survivors.
Only 50 examples of the Shelby Terlingua Mustang exist, and Lou Costabile got a personal walkaround of this yellow one straight from Shelby American’s President and Vice President of Operations at the company’s Las Vegas facility. The name traces back to the 1967 SCCA Trans-Am Championship win, and the exclusivity shows in every detail the two executives point out on camera. Watch to see what separates this build from the other 49.
GM design chief Bill Mitchell wanted a full-size luxury coupe with the drama of a 1930s speedster, and the boattail Riviera is what happened. He modeled its tapered tail on the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray he considered his masterpiece, then watched the shape get stretched across a much larger body. Mitchell himself later admitted the result looked less like a speedboat than a tugboat. This 1973 example, the last year of the design, went through Count’s Kustoms.
Plymouth built the Road Runner on a contrarian idea: strip out the luxury everyone else was adding, keep the price low, and let an enormous engine do the talking. Sales projections were in the low thousands. It sold forty-four thousand in its first year. Read on for the cartoon licensing deal, the horn that cost ten thousand dollars to develop, and the mid-year option package that turned a budget muscle car into a Hemi hunter.
Pontiac built 6,833 GTO Judges for 1969 and only 108 of them were convertibles. This one is believed to be the last Judge convertible built for the model year, wearing a special-order color and carrying the 366-horsepower Ram Air III 400. The Judge started life as John DeLorean’s plan for a cheap, stripped GTO to fight the Road Runner, and then got optioned into something else entirely. Here is how that happened.
The 1965 Ford Falcon Futura is one of the most consequential cars almost nobody talks about. Ford’s compact outsold expectations by an enormous margin, and the engineering underneath it went on to carry the Mustang, the Fairlane, and a long list of Ford performance cars. In Futura trim with a 289 it was quietly quick. Read on for why clean V8 Futuras have become sneaky collector cars.
Chevrolet builds 69 COPO Camaros a year, sells every one, and not a single one of them can legally touch a public road. The name traces back to a 1969 paperwork loophole that let dealers order 427-powered Camaros the option book said did not exist, including 69 cars with an all-aluminum ZL1 big-block. Chevy revived the idea at the 2011 SEMA Show and has staged the reveal there almost every fall since. Here is how the trick actually worked.
Most barn finds are interesting for what has gone wrong with them. This 1964 Dodge Polara is interesting for what stayed right: a factory big block and a four-speed still in place after decades in rural Texas. Polaras almost never get the attention Chargers and Coronets do, which is exactly how a car like this hides in plain sight. Read on to find out what Dodge was really building in 1964.
This 1982 Chevrolet Corvette Collector Edition, finished in Silver Beige, marks the final year of the C3 body style and comes with a feature no other C3 ever got: a rear hatch that actually opens. Lou Costabile tracks it down at Corvette Mike Midwest in Burr Ridge, Illinois, where owner Bill Kotzum has specialized in Corvettes since 2004. Watch to find out what else makes this Collector Edition unique.