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A naturally aspirated Mustang built to embarrass cars twice its price versus a supercharged Camaro with 136 more horsepower, settled by a professional driver on a real road course in Arizona. The lap times came back 2.45 seconds apart, and the reason had less to do with the horsepower gap than with what was inside each car’s shock absorbers. The result exposed how much modern damper technology actually buys you.
A 1964 Ford F-100 left Dearborn as a work truck for farmers and tradesmen. This one has a chopped roof, a hole cut through the hood, and a flame job loud enough to be heard from the next aisle over. What makes 1964 the right year to start with is a construction change Ford made that year, one most builders never think about. Read on for what Ford changed and why it matters to anyone cutting one up.
Ford did not want the GT350R to be quick in a straight line — it wanted a Mustang that could hold its own on a road course, which meant throwing out the muscle car playbook. Out went the back seat and the air conditioning. In went a flat-plane-crank 5.2-liter V8 revving to 8,250 rpm and carbon fiber wheels that cut fifteen pounds from each corner. Read on for what Ford’s most track-focused production Mustang actually gave up to get there.
A hand-built supercar wearing a wing large enough to generate real downforce, a muscle coupe still leaning on a naturally aspirated big-inch V8, and a four-door sedan capable of embarrassing sports cars twice its price. Dodge’s SRT lineup rarely gets credit for how differently each of these machines chases speed, through aerodynamics, displacement, or a supercharger. Three cars, three completely different answers to the same question.
A 1965 Impala never needed a stripe package to get attention — the pillarless hardtop roofline handled that on its own. But partway through the model year Chevrolet quietly replaced one of its most famous engines with something entirely new, and the switch reshaped the car’s character and its collector value. This customized example adds modern wheels and upgrades no factory buyer could option. Read on for what changed under the hood and how to spot an early ’65 from a late one.
By 1973, Ford already knew the Mustang convertible was finished — regulations and buyer trends were closing in, and no drop-top Mustang would follow until 1983. Buyers reacted the way buyers do when they hear something is ending: convertible sales nearly doubled. This Blue Glow example with a white interior, power everything and its original 302 shows exactly what the last one looked like. Read on to find out why the 1973 cars deserve more respect than they get.
An 800-horsepower 1968 Camaro RS/SS convertible described as running a blown 427 small block sounds like a contradiction, since 427 has meant big block to Chevrolet people for sixty years. It is not a contradiction, and the explanation involves both an aftermarket engine trend and a corporate rule that Chevrolet enforced strictly in 1968. Here is how the numbers work, and how dealers got around the rule the first time.
Ford invented the modern car-based pickup with the 1957 Ranchero, then spent 1958 giving it a completely new face borrowed from the Thunderbird’s design language. This red and black two-tone example runs the 292 Y-block V8 backed by a three-speed manual — the configuration most 1958 buyers actually chose. Production that year barely cleared 10,000 units. Read on to find out why the Ranchero’s second year is the hardest one to find today.
In 1979, during an actual fuel crisis, Dennis Szarzynski borrowed money from his aunt to buy a Top Banana 1970 Dodge Super Bee with a 440 Six Pack under the hood. More than four decades later, he’s still the car’s only owner. Read on to find out what a factory triple-carburetor big-block actually sounds like under full throttle, and why single-owner muscle cars like this one have become increasingly rare in the collector world.
Ford built the 1936 half-ton to haul feed and lumber, and gave it a rounded grille and skirted fenders purely to make it look more like a car. Eighty years later that decision is why builders keep reaching for this exact body to hang wild paint, hydraulics, and a tilting front clip on. The truck that started as a tool became one of the most reworked shapes in American customizing. Read on for how a work truck became a canvas.
Scott Zeller’s father owned three Mercury Cougars before Scott bought this 1969 XR7 in black paint with a 351 V8, and that family history is central to why this particular car keeps drawing a crowd at Chicago-area car shows. Filmed at the Monday Night Car Shows in Skokie, Illinois, the video captures a nameplate that history has quietly underrated next to its Mustang sibling. Watch to hear the engine and the story behind it.
Ford built 7,014 Boss 302 Mustangs in 1970, more than four times the previous year’s run, and yet a genuinely numbers-matching example still stops people in their tracks. The car exists because of a rulebook rather than a showroom wish list: Ford needed a homologated 302 to chase the Camaro Z/28 around Trans-Am road courses. Then it handed the styling to a designer who had never done a full production car. Read on for what he came up with.
Only one automaker ever sold a factory street car wearing two different tire sizes front to rear, and it was not a styling decision. Plymouth needed 2,724 examples built in a five-week sprint to satisfy a racing rulebook, and Dan Gurney’s fingerprints are all over the result. This Alpine White AAR ‘Cuda carries a 340 topped with three two-barrel carburetors and a fiberglass hood. Read on for the rulebook that shaped every strange choice on it.
This yellow Dodge looks like an ordinary Dart until you learn what a group of Southern California dealers did in late 1964. Frustrated by the Barracuda and Mustang pulling traffic away, they ordered a factory kit that turned a compact Dart into something wearing a name Dodge would not use on a real car for another year. Sold in one state, finished almost exclusively in one colour, and now almost impossible to find. Read on.