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Ford did not have the GT package ready when the Mustang launched. It took a full year of buyers snapping up the pony car before an option group appeared for drivers who wanted their car to handle and stop the way it looked. Roughly 15,000 of that year’s half-million Mustangs got it, and because the package never appeared in the VIN, telling a real one from a tribute takes paperwork. Read on for what was actually in the box.
Jeff Fleming has owned several muscle cars, but his Lemon Twist Yellow 1970 Plymouth GTX, bought in 2013, is the one he’s still eager to show off at a car meet in Northwest Indiana. The 440 + 6 badge on the fender tells Mopar fans exactly what’s under the hood, a Six Pack setup that separated this car from a standard 440. Hear Fleming explain why this specific GTX made the cut.
They call it Deathtrap, and it was built for one of drag racing’s most unforgiving formats: small tire, where a narrow drag radial has to absorb everything the engine makes. The Fox body Mustang has become the default chassis in this class for reasons Ford never anticipated when it built the platform as an economy commuter. Read on for why turbos suit the format, and why the converter matters more than the horsepower number.
Most builders pick one form of forced induction and stop there. This 1969 Camaro SS runs a 14-71 supercharger, a pair of 68mm turbochargers, and a fogger nitrous system, all feeding the same 468-cubic-inch big-block. It sits on a full Pro Street chassis with a cage, wheelie bars, and a parachute, yet the interior is finished in leather good enough for a Riddler contender. Read on for why nobody, including its owner, has ever put it on a dyno.
Almost nobody ordered a 1966 Chevy II Nova wagon with a V8, which is exactly why one turns heads now. The same sharp restyle that reshaped the whole Nova line for 1966 applied to the wagon too, and buyers could order a 327 rated as high as 275 horsepower in that body. There was one engine Chevrolet refused to put in it. Read on to find out which one, and why a V8 wagon is the rarer find today.
The 2017 Corvette Grand Sport brought 460 horsepower and the Z06’s wide body for around $66,000. The refreshed Porsche 911 Carrera S made 420 horsepower from a twin-turbocharged flat-six and cost closer to $104,000. On the spec sheet that looks like a rout, and then the test results came back and refused to line up with the numbers. Here is where each car actually wins, and why the price gap does not settle it.
Ford built the Boss 302 for exactly one reason, and it had nothing to do with street driving. Handing that same high-revving, solid-lifter engine to a Mercury Cougar looks almost like an afterthought, yet that is what happened once the Eliminator package took over as Mercury’s performance flagship. Only 469 Cougars were built with it. This Competition Gold example is documented as a one-of-one. Read on for how a country-club coupe ended up with a race engine.
Mercury built the Cougar to sell refinement, with hidden headlights, a plusher cabin and advertising built around sophistication rather than stripes. Then Ford handed it the 428 Cobra Jet and refinement stopped being the point. Order sheets show fewer than 130 Ram Air Cobra Jet Cougars left the line that year in any body style, and convertibles built to this specification were rarer still. Read on for how a country-club car became one of the era’s hardest finds.
Under the hood of this fastback sits an all-aluminum, four-cam V8 that was built to win at Indianapolis, not to sit at a stoplight. It belongs to a family of engines that took three consecutive Indy 500 victories and ended the Offenhauser era before turbocharging brought it back. Getting one to idle in traffic required rethinking almost everything about how it breathes. Read on for what that actually took.
At the 2017 World of Wheels show in Rosemont, Illinois, Lou Costabile finds a Lightning Blue Roush Stage 3 Mustang that isn’t owned by a collector at all — it’s a rolling partnership between Roush Performance and Meguiar’s Car Care Products. Driver Spike Anderson explains exactly how that arrangement works and why this six-speed, supercharged Mustang exists in the first place. The story behind the car turns out to be as interesting as the car itself.
The 1963 Corvette Sting Ray was a complete reinvention — new chassis, independent rear suspension, hidden headlights, and a split rear window that lasted exactly one model year. Put one in the hands of Alloway’s Hot Rod Shop, a place known nationally for black paint and a stance that looks like it is trying to get under the pavement, and the result is a specific kind of collision between two design philosophies. Read on to find out what makes that combination work.
Nobody at this drag event could identify the mystery vehicle drawing a crowd – until 1320video tracked down the owner and got the hood open. It turns out to be a Local Motors Rally Fighter, essentially a sand rail in body panels, hiding a supercharged LS3 V8. Watch to see it make a pass nobody expected.
By 1973 the American luxury convertible market had narrowed to exactly one survivor, and the Cadillac Eldorado was it. Lincoln had walked away in 1967 and Chrysler’s Imperial followed a year later, leaving Cadillac alone with a 500-cubic-inch V8, front-wheel drive and no competition to undercut it. Then one of them paced the Indianapolis 500. Read on for what it was really like to own the last of a dying breed.
A 1969 Dodge Charger gets a modern supercharged Hellcat V8 transplant in this build, appropriately named ‘Reverence,’ from the specialists at Cleveland Power & Performance. The test drive captures how a decades-old muscle car icon behaves with more than 700 horsepower now sitting under the hood. Watch to hear exactly what a Hellcat swap sounds like packed into a classic Charger this size.
An 84mm turbo poking through the grille tells experienced drag racers everything they need to know before the engine fires. This Mustang carries an LS swap and runs in the eight second bracket, which requires roughly four-figure horsepower and a chassis certified to match. Read on for why the boost curve matters more than the peak number, and why consistency is harder to achieve than speed.