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Ford hired away a General Motors executive, who promptly hired away the designer behind the Camaro Z/28, and the Boss 302 is what came out the other end. It was never really a trim level, it was a homologation special built because SCCA rules demanded Ford sell one to the public before it could go racing. Fewer than 8,700 were built across two model years. Read on to find out what made it worth the trouble.
Ralph Carungi calls his 1958 Gaylord Gladiator “The Batmobile in the Tuxedo,” a line Lou Costabile first heard at an invitation-only concours limited to 90 cars, and couldn’t forget. This is believed to be the first video ever made of the car, which Ralph considers a true one-of-one. But one commenter, who worked for designer Brooks Stevens, insists a second example was built and stolen off a European dock decades ago. So which story is true?
This 1973 Ford Mustang Mach 1 sits at an overlooked hinge point in Mustang history – the final year of the original first-generation pony car before Ford downsized into the Mustang II. Watch This Car’s short walkaround doesn’t dig into VIN-level history, so the comments end up doing some of the work instead, including a Polish viewer inviting the channel to see a better-documented Mach 1 near Malbork. It’s a small, quietly significant survivor most muscle car fans skip right past. Watch to see why it shouldn’t be overlooked.
A supercharged big block pushed past 700 horsepower on pump gas, custom suspension, and a nine-inch Ford differential under a 1967 Chevelle Super Sport. The factory version of this car was capped by a General Motors corporate memo that actually reduced its advertised horsepower that year, and the legendary 375-horsepower L78 was not even on the order sheet. Read on to find out how the badge and the build connect.
Chevrolet built plenty of 454-powered Chevelles for 1970, but only one version of that engine turned the car into a legend. The LS6 carried solid lifters, forged internals and an 11.25:1 compression ratio, and just 4,475 of them were built for the entire model year. Here is why 1970 was the only season it could have happened, and what those gross horsepower numbers really mean when you read them today.
Two cars, three decades apart, both built around the same unusual idea: a high-performance engine wrapped in a body shaped for hauling people and cargo, not chasing lap times. One is a full-size American wagon with a glass-topped rear cabin. The other is a V12 shooting-brake from Maranello that sends power to all four wheels. Which one actually deserves the garage space?
Two nearly identical turbocharged Mustangs, two well-known names from the online street racing scene, and a Houston backstreet that had hosted plenty of grudge matches before this one. Chris Hamilton’s BoostedGT went up against a car nicknamed Black Jesus in a race that came down to a margin thin enough to guarantee a rematch.
This 1964 AMC Rambler American 440 convertible has a name that confuses everyone who hears it – “440” refers to AMC’s top trim level, not a big-block V8, and even longtime commenters can’t agree on which of AMC’s inline sixes is actually under the hood. samspace81’s quick road test walks through a car built during Rambler’s commercial peak, right as the muscle car era it never joined was just getting started. Former Rambler owners fill the comments with their own stories. Watch to see what made this quiet compact worth remembering.
Ford built the Boss 351 for exactly one model year, 1971, to homologate a racing program it had already walked away from. Fewer than two thousand left the factory before the entire Boss nameplate was retired. Underneath the wider, heavier restyled Mustang sat a 351 Cleveland assembled from a parts-counter wish list, and in Grabber Lime it announced itself from a block away. Here is what the engineers managed to push through, and why the car is still undervalued.
Burnouts look like pure chaos, but the smoke show hides a surprising amount of engineering logic underneath it. The maneuver started as a practical fix for a specific starting-line problem drag racers kept running into, decades before it became a backyard and social-media spectacle. Here’s how it went from a track necessity to one of muscle car culture’s defining rituals.
Dodge built exactly 71 Hemi Challengers for 1971, the engine’s final year, and not one of them was a convertible. That makes this smoky, 426-powered droptop a build rather than a survivor, assembled by someone who decided the combination should have existed even though the order books say it never did. Read on to find out why the factory walked away from its most famous engine.
Chevrolet sold the Rally Sport and Super Sport packages separately in 1967, so a genuine RS/SS required a buyer to pay for both, and factory-correct examples are rarer than either package alone. This one keeps that foundation and swaps in 502 cubic inches of modern General Motors crate big block, an engine rated well beyond anything the factory offered. Read on to find out why builders keep making that trade.
Put a Hemi badge, a bowtie, and a galloping pony on the same drag strip and the internet will argue about the results for years. Independent 0-60 testing on the Camaro SS, Mustang GT, and Challenger has produced wildly different spreads depending on trim, tires, and driver. Here’s what the numbers actually show, and what’s really under each hood.
Ford built roughly 100 Fairlane Thunderbolts for 1964 with fiberglass hoods, fenders and doors, Plexiglas windows, no heater or radio, and a trunk-mounted battery, all to get a 427 High Riser into the most favorable Super Stock bracket the rulebook allowed. The 425-horsepower rating on the paperwork fooled nobody in the sport. Gas Ronda won the Winternationals with one, and Ford lost money on every car it delivered. Read on for what separates a real Thunderbolt from a very good tribute.
That exhaust note did not come from the base engine. In 1973 Chevrolet sold two entirely different 350 cubic-inch V8s in the Camaro, separated by one option box and a hundred horsepower, and the more serious one was built with four-bolt mains and a forged crank. This was also the last year the second-generation car wore its clean chrome front end before federal bumper rules changed it. Read on for what separated the two engines.