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A W-30 badge on a 1969 Oldsmobile 442 already means something rare, but this car carries an extra layer most American muscle cars never get: a passport. Oldsmobile built just 171 W-30 sport coupes for the entire model year, and only five of them were sold new in Canada. Read on to find out what the Force-Air Induction system actually did and why tracking down a car like this has more in common with genealogy than car shopping.
When Bennie Horton turned eighteen, his father handed him more than a graduation gift — he handed him a 1965 Ford Mustang GT Convertible in Silver Smoke Gray the family had owned since new. Four years ago, Bennie gave the car the restoration it deserved, and today it carries a story most owners can only dream of: a documented lineage, a decades-old photograph held by an uncle who’s never seen the finished car, and a family that never let it go.
Hudsons Rod and Customs is refreshing a 1957 Chevrolet pickup that already wears the shop’s own logo, a client’s truck serving double duty as a rolling advertisement. An LS swap is planned for reliability, while a temporary Cadillac-sourced leather interior holds things over until a fully custom cabin gets built. Watch to see what a custom shop chooses to change on its own showcase vehicle.
Dodge’s 2016 Challenger SRT Hellcat paired a 707-horsepower supercharged V8 with an 11.2-second quarter mile and a factory fuel economy rating nobody expected it to hold onto. This is the story of what that power actually cost owners day to day, from tire wear to insurance premiums, and why the Hellcat era changed how every manufacturer building a pony car thought about horsepower. Read on to see how the numbers held up once the burnout ended.
A Plum Crazy 1971 Plymouth ‘Cuda with a Shaker hood, billboard stripes, and three two-barrel carburetors feeding a 440 is about as loud as Mopar ever got. Plymouth quoted 385 horsepower, a figure even people close to the factory considered conservative. What is genuinely surprising is how few buyers ordered it that year: just 254 cars. Read on to find out what happened to make one of Plymouth’s best engines disappear almost overnight.
This 1971 Plymouth ‘Cuda carries the model’s only four-headlight styling and arrived in the final season Plymouth offered the 426 Hemi — a combination that made fewer than 120 Hemi ‘Cudas among the rarest muscle cars Plymouth ever built. Read on to find out what was happening in the market that made Plymouth’s most powerful car also its rarest.
For years General Motors capped how much engine its mid-size cars were allowed to carry, and that corporate rule quietly strangled the Chevelle’s potential. The cap disappeared for 1970, and Chevrolet moved immediately, jumping from a 396-badged big block straight to a genuine 454 with up to 450 horsepower. Read on to find out what changed inside GM to make that leap possible and why this single model year is still considered the high point of Chevelle performance.
This 1970 Dodge Challenger wears Panther Pink, a genuine factory paint option that took real nerve to order on a muscle car. Underneath it sits a 440, and Dodge offered that engine two very different ways that year. One had a single four-barrel and 375 horsepower; the other stacked three two-barrels on the same block and turned it into something close to a factory drag car. Read on to find out which 440 was actually the one to have.
Pontiac rated the 1969 GTO’s Ram Air IV at 370 horsepower, and almost nobody who worked on the engine believed that figure. Round-port heads, a long-duration camshaft, and an aluminum intake made it far closer to a factory race engine than a street option, and Pontiac reportedly lost money on every one it built. Read on to find out why a company would sell a car at a loss just to put a number on a spec sheet.
Ryan Martin’s Fireball Camaro, tuned to roughly 3,000 horsepower on its small turbos, lines up for a $50,000 no prep grudge match at the Armageddon event. The pass did not go the way the horsepower numbers suggested it should, and 1320video even had to correct an earlier version of the footage afterward. Watch to see how a half million dollar build stacked up against a reputation four seasons of Street Outlaws built.
Ford built the GT350R around a naturally aspirated flat-plane V8 nicknamed ‘Voodoo,’ a design more common in Italian exotics than American pony cars, and stripped weight from everywhere else to match. The result is widely considered the most track-focused factory Mustang Ford has ever produced, one that revives Carroll Shelby’s original 1965 competition mission decades later. Read on to find out what makes this specific test drive worth paying attention to.
This 1971 Dodge Charger is a first twice over and a last once: the first Hemi Charger of a brand-new body style, and the final year the 426 Hemi was ever offered in one. It was a factory pilot car that was never supposed to be sold at all, yet it escaped and went out the door through one of the most famous Mopar dealerships in America. Read on to find out how small the 1971 Hemi Charger production number really was.
Calling a 1962 Chevrolet Impala two-door hardtop sweet barely scratches what that model year actually meant for Chevrolet. A $53.80 trim option that had existed for barely a year was about to become one of the most influential ideas in the company’s history, and at the top of the engine range sat a 409 that made buyers give up their automatic transmission to get it. Read on to find out how the Super Sport took over and how close this hardtop came to the fastest option on the lot.
This 1965 Chevrolet C/10 Pickup wears a patina finish its owner never bothered to smooth out, and hides a supercharged small-block Chevy underneath it. Spotted parked at Riffey’s Hot Rods, it’s less a show truck than a genuine sleeper, built to be driven rather than trailered. Watch to see why an unfinished-looking paint job and a blower poking through the hood make for one of the more honest builds on the channel.
The fastback roofline on this 1967 Chevrolet Impala did not appear out of nowhere. Chevrolet borrowed the idea from a rival GM division’s flagship coupe, and the result reshaped the full-size Impala for the rest of the decade. Underneath that shape sat one of the widest engine ranges Chevrolet ever offered on a single body, running from a mild inline-six all the way to a 385-horsepower 427. Read on to find out just how far apart the mildest and wildest versions of the same car really were.