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Shelby rated the 1965 Cobra 427 at 410 horsepower in street trim and roughly 485 in competition specification, numbers that made it the fastest American road car of its era. So where does a figure like 575 horsepower come from? The answer involves continuation cars, modern crate engines, and a shape that never stopped being built. Here is how to tell the original numbers from everything that followed.
Only twelve people ever ordered a 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T with a 426 Hemi and a convertible top — and just five came with a manual transmission, like this Plum Crazy Purple example from the Brothers Collection. The factory fender tag tells the whole story, down to the exact rear gear ratio and interior trim code. See how V8TV verifies a claim this rare, one code at a time.
Eleanor is one of the most recognizable Mustangs on earth, and almost nothing about it is what people assume. It was never a factory Shelby, the name was borrowed from an earlier film, and Shelby American never built a 1967 GT500 convertible for the public at all. That makes a drop-top Eleanor a custom built on top of a custom. Read on for the design history, the production reality, and the copyright fight it triggered.
The same man has owned this 1955 Chevrolet for forty-one years. Nine of those years went into a build that started out as a drag car and quietly turned into something else entirely, ending up with 1,250 horsepower, a fully custom interior, and a father-and-son story attached to it. The Pro Street stance it wears is not a random styling choice. Read on to find out what it is actually quoting.
A 1964 Dodge Polara doesn’t usually headline a muscle car video, but a 440 cubic-inch big block fed by dual Edelbrock quads, a 4-speed manual, and a Dana 60 rear end change that equation fast. Southern-car rust history and a seller’s unusually honest paint rating round out a listing built for buyers who read spec sheets, not just headlines. See why this overlooked full-size Mopar is drawing serious attention.
Chevrolet sold the 1968 Corvette L88 with no heater, no radio, a horsepower rating everyone knew was fiction, and a requirement for racing fuel most gas stations never carried. It was designed to discourage casual buyers, and it worked so well that only 80 were built that year. Here is what Chevrolet was actually hiding behind that deliberately unimpressive 430-horsepower number.
ScottieDTV found this 1966 Chevrolet Caprice at the 2017 NSRA Street Rod Nationals South in Knoxville, and the mods are almost invisible — a seamlessly grafted Big Block Chevelle hood, a Ridetech air suspension that lays the car nearly on the ground, and a Tuned Port Injection 350 under the hood. It’s a full-size cruiser built with more restraint than flash, and the comment section calls it one of the best Caprice builds anyone’s seen. Watch to see the details up close.
A 1982 Corvette showing up in Iceland is far less strange than it sounds once you know what that model year actually was. It was the last C3 ever built, the first Corvette with electronic fuel injection, the only one offered exclusively with an automatic, and, as a Collector Edition, the first to break $20,000 and the first with an opening rear hatch. Chevrolet built 25,407 of them. Read on to find out why it deserves a second look.
A stock Dodge Hellcat’s factory tires look aggressive enough to pass for an aftermarket upgrade, but every size on every trim rolled off the assembly line exactly as Dodge specified it. From the original 2015 car’s 275/40ZR20s to the Super Stock’s massive 315-width rear tires, the rubber underneath a Hellcat does as much work as the supercharged Hemi on top of it. Read on to find out exactly how much of a Hellcat’s quarter-mile time comes down to what’s bolted to the wheels.
Visal Chum first saw an Acura NSX as a teenager and didn’t stop thinking about it until he finally tracked down this 1992 Formula Red example decades later. Lou Costabile catches up with him at a Chicago car show to talk about the search, the patience it took, and why he calls the NSX ‘the purest sports car.’ Watch the full conversation above.
One car chase filmed across San Francisco in 1968 did more for the second-generation Dodge Charger than any advertising campaign ever could. The villains’ black R/T was not a movie prop built for the occasion. It was a production car anyone could order, with a 440 Magnum standard and a 426 HEMI on the option sheet. Read on for what the R/T package actually included, and why real ones still chase movie-car money.
The P code on this 1956 Fairlane Sunliner’s data plate identifies the Thunderbird Special, a 312-cubic-inch V8 with a four-barrel carburetor rated at 225 horsepower, the strongest engine Ford offered that year. Pulled from a private California collection and wearing correct Bermuda Blue and Diamond Blue paint, it is a documented top-tier car rather than another dressed-up convertible. Here is what that code actually bought.
This numbers-matching 1968 Chevrolet Impala SS 396 runs the streets of Dallas with air conditioning, power steering, a 12-bolt rear end, bucket seats and an AM eight-track. Full-size performance was never as popular as the Chevelle or Camaro, which is exactly why a genuine SS 396 Impala with its original drivetrain has become so much harder to find. Read on for what the Super Sport package actually bought and how many were really built.
Ford never really built the Boss 429 Mustang for customers. It existed to satisfy a NASCAR rulebook, and the engine was so large that Ford had to ship partly built cars to an outside contractor just to get it installed. Only 859 were completed for 1969, wearing almost no badging and none of the spoilers or louvers that marked the other Boss cars. Read on for what Ford was really doing, and why the factory rating was fiction.
By 1971 the muscle car era was collapsing under insurance surcharges and mandated compression cuts, and Oldsmobile responded by building the 442 anyway. For one final year buyers could order the range-topping W-30 package in a convertible body. Almost nobody did, and the surviving production figure is small enough to make seasoned collectors stop and re-read it. Read on for what the W-30 actually included and why this exact configuration is so hard to find.