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A 1968 Plymouth GTX in B5 Blue with the rare 440+6 Six Pack setup would be notable on its own, but owner Kevin Plummer’s reason for buying it is what turns heads. He spent years chasing down the exact car his father owned when he was a boy, and he’s owned it since 2015. The comment section fills with strangers telling nearly identical stories about their own fathers.
This 1964 Buick Riviera was originally sketched as a Cadillac under the code name “La Salle II” before Cadillac passed and Buick claimed the design instead. Buyers could order the 425 V8 rated at 340 horsepower or the dual-carb “Super Wildcat” version making 360, and Buick moved nearly 38,000 that year. Read on to find out how a rejected Cadillac project became one of the decade’s most respected personal luxury cars.
A 1958 Ford Ranchero isn’t the car you’d expect to see wearing a roll bar and side pipes, but that’s exactly what makes this Pro Street build worth talking about. Ford’s second-year hauler borrowed its facelift from the Thunderbird and offered up to 300 horsepower from a fresh 352 V8, hardly the stuff of drag strip legend. Someone clearly disagreed. Take a look at how this family grocery-getter got the full strip-brawler treatment.
Built on a 2008 Crown Victoria Police Interceptor chassis and wearing a 1985 Ford F-150 bullnose body on top, this SEMA 2016 street truck combines Eaton springs, a Metco Motorsports billet rear four-link, and a six-inch-raised bed floor into one clean, restrained build. Commenters praised it specifically for what the builder didn’t touch, no shaved handles, no over-modification. Watch the full walkaround to see how a police cruiser ended up wearing a classic Ford’s clothes.
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.
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.
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.