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No 1966 Chevelle ever left a Chevrolet assembly plant with 496 cubic inches under the hood, because that number simply did not exist on Chevy’s big-block order sheet yet. So a car wearing SS 496 badges is telling you something about the person who built it rather than the factory that shipped it. Here is what Chevrolet actually offered in 1966, and where a genuine 496 really comes from.
At Heartland Park Topeka, one driver has built a reputation for treeing the field, out-reacting seasoned competitors off the line, in a nitrous-fed K5 Blazer nicknamed Open Container. He runs the truck with hand controls, and the comment section keeps circling back to one word: respect. See the runs that have fans asking if there is anyone he cannot beat off the line.
A light blue 1972 Ford Gran Torino Sport with a 351 under the hood and an exhaust note that still gets attention decades later. This was Ford’s redesigned Torino arriving at the worst possible moment in muscle car history, and one engine in the entire lineup carried the Cobra Jet name. Thirty-six years later a Clint Eastwood film would make the shape famous all over again. Read on to find out what the 1972 Gran Torino Sport really was.
A 1969 Chevrolet Camaro built as a pro-touring machine and nicknamed Piranha takes the most sought-after body style of the first generation and rebuilds almost everything underneath it. The final year of the first-gen Camaro is already the one everybody wants, which raises the stakes on every decision a builder makes. Read on to find out what pro touring actually requires and why these builds keep climbing at auction.
Mercury launched the Cougar in 1967 and immediately took Motor Trend’s Car of the Year award away from the brand-new Chevrolet Camaro. Built on a Mustang platform stretched three inches, it added hidden headlights, sequential taillights, and a level of refinement Ford’s own pony car never attempted. Nearly 151,000 sold in the first year, about forty percent of the entire division’s volume. Here is what made the first-year car work.
The lime green Challenger that gets shoved out of a cargo plane in Furious 7 is not a 2015 car at all. It is a 2011 Dodge Challenger SRT8, packing the returning 6.4-liter HEMI rated at 470 horsepower and 470 lb-ft, then fitted with push bars, a roof-mounted harpoon, and a parachute. Here is what Dodge built and what the stunt team bolted on top.
A 2010 Camaro SS left the factory with an LS3 rated at 426 horsepower. This widebody example claims 1,500 at the rear wheels, which means almost nothing inside the block is original and the fenders had to grow to keep the tires underneath it. Here is what GM actually shipped in 2010 and what it takes to more than triple it.
A 440 bored and stroked to 535 cubic inches, roughly 700 horsepower, Viper-inspired hood louvers, and rear fenders widened enough to swallow 12-inch tires. This 1968 Dodge Charger build is not chasing subtlety anywhere on the car. The bodywork alone tells you what the builder was solving for. Read on to find out what the factory 1968 Charger was, and what it takes to make one put that kind of power to the ground.
Motor Trend tested a great many muscle cars during the genre’s peak years, and in 1970 it handed a title to a car almost nobody expected: the quickest stock quarter-mile machine the magazine had ever run. It was not a Hemi or a Boss. It was a Buick, from a brand associated with country club parking lots, and its advertised horsepower figure was the least interesting number on the sheet.
A 1971 Plymouth Barracuda lighting up its rear tires is a good time on its own, but the year on the fender is the part that matters. This was the last season Plymouth would sell a Barracuda with a big-block of any kind, the last year for the convertible, and the last year before horsepower ratings changed forever. The 383 under this hood was already living on borrowed time. Read on to find out why 1971 ended the E-body as buyers knew it.
This unassuming Chevy Nova hides a twin-turbocharged 406 cubic-inch small-block making over 800 horsepower, enough to run the quarter-mile in the 9-second range. On the street, it has reportedly beaten heavily modified GT-Rs and gone toe-to-toe with supercharged Corvettes. But big turbo power on a decades-old chassis is a high-wire act, where one hard pass can turn triumph into a very expensive failure.
Blip the throttle on a Challenger R/T Shaker and the hood scoop visibly twitches, because it is bolted to the engine rather than the body. Dodge borrowed that trick straight from the 1970 Challenger R/T. The 2014 package cost around 5,000 dollars, added almost nothing on paper, and buyers kept ordering it anyway. Here is what came with it, and why the manual cars are the ones collectors now watch.
American Motors built the Ambassador as its flagship for eighteen model years, and 1966 was the year the gamble finally paid off, with sales climbing to roughly 71,000 from under 19,000 just two years earlier. The DPL hardtop sat at the very top of that range with reclining buckets and AMC’s largest V8. Here is why an unrestored survivor from a brand this overlooked is genuinely harder to find than a big-name muscle car.
A 1957 Ford Custom 300 called 700 Proof wears a moonshine-runner theme on the outside and a supercharged modern Ford V8 underneath, and the name is a dyno number, not a joke. Almost nothing about the build is what it appears to be at a glance, from the hood scoop to the wheels to the head design bolted under the blower. Read on to find out what is actually hiding under that plain-looking paint.
Calling this an awesome Chevy truck undersells what actually changed underneath it. 1965 was the year Chevrolet quietly rewrote the rulebook for its half-ton line, adding a 327 V8 to the C10 order sheet and offering factory in-dash air conditioning on a vehicle otherwise fitted with a vinyl bench and a column shifter. None of it shows in the sheetmetal. Here is what separates a 1965 short wide bed from the trucks that came just before it.