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In 1969 Chevrolet let a handful of buyers order an all-aluminum, race-bred 427 that needed fuel no gas station actually sold — and it nearly doubled the price of the car it went into. Only 69 Camaros and 2 Corvettes ever left the factory with the ZL1 option. Read on for the dyno numbers, the drag strip runs that outran them, and why this engine’s window of availability was so brief.
NHRA’s 50 Greatest Drivers list wasn’t slapped together as clickbait – it came out of a genuine blue-ribbon panel debate for the sanctioning body’s 50th anniversary, weighing everything from national event wins to the sport’s technological history. Don Garlits sits at number one, with John Force, Don Prudhomme, Bob Glidden, and Shirley Muldowney rounding out a top five that basically built modern drag racing. Decades later, NHRA even expanded it into a Top 75 list for its 75th anniversary. So who’s your pick for the top spot?
This 1970 Ford Torino King Cobra prototype was built to fight Chrysler’s aerodynamic NASCAR cars, wrapping an extended nose around the race-bred Boss 429 V8 before NASCAR’s rule changes killed the entire program. Only a handful of these prototypes were ever built, making this one of the rarest Fords in existence. Take a detailed look at a car that came remarkably close to reaching Ford showrooms before the aero wars ended.
Most 1957 Thunderbird buyers never knew Ford quietly built America’s first production supercharged V8 that same year. Roughly 200 F-code cars left the factory rated at 300 horsepower — though Paxton itself claimed the real number was closer to 360. Here’s the story behind Ford’s rarest personal luxury car of the decade.
Car News TV goes looking for the muscle cars everyone forgot, and the list includes a Mustang wagon that left viewers stunned it ever existed, a six-barrel Road Runner that sparked a comments-section correction, and a Studebaker Avanti nobody expected to see. Watch the full rundown and see how many you actually remember.
Ford rated this Mustang’s big block at just 375 horsepower, a figure almost nobody who drove one actually believed. Built to satisfy NASCAR homologation rules and assembled outside the factory by an outside engineering firm, this car packed race-bred internals most buyers never fully understood. Discover why enthusiasts still debate its real output decades later, and how a Hemi-inspired head design ended up under a Ford hood.
A Studebaker executive sketched a car on an airplane, and forty days later engineers had a working prototype of America’s first personal luxury muscle car. The Avanti’s story is stranger than most, involving disc brakes before anyone else offered them and a Bonneville-record-setting supercharged engine. Read on to see how a dying company built something this ambitious.
Chevrolet’s 350 spent from 1981 to 1996 quietly reinventing itself under different VIN codes — a low-compression truck motor, a twin-throttle-body Corvette engine, and eventually a tuned-port small block making 245 horsepower. Along the way it powered everything from K30 pickups and motorhomes to the Buick Roadmaster and even the Hummer H1. Read on to see how one engine family did so many different jobs across three decades of GM production.
Three of the most famous small-block Chevrolet engines ever built, the 302, the 327, and the 350, share the same 4.0-inch bore, the same block casting, and in many cases the same casting numbers. Only the stroke tells them apart. This third installment in our small-block series follows the 4.0-inch bore family from the 1962 327 through the 1968 journal change, the Trans-Am 302, the Duntov cam, and the 350 that eventually powered everything from Corvettes to delivery vans. Read on to find out how one casting did so much.
Rocky Mountain Race Week throws a group of street-legal cars making 2,000 to 3,000 horsepower into a five-day, multi-track endurance test through triple-digit Nebraska heat. This 2017 recap follows day one in Kearney, where sleep-deprived racers are still finishing builds the night before testing begins. Watch to see which of these 2,000-plus horsepower street machines actually survive the heat before the real racing even starts.
The muscle car era began with a simple formula — a mid-size body stuffed with a big-block engine — and the 1964 Pontiac GTO is usually credited with starting it. What followed was a decade-long horsepower race, an insurance industry backlash, and a near-death experience courtesy of 1970s emissions rules. Read on for how the format survived all of it, twice, and why Mustangs, Camaros, and Chargers are still fighting the same fight today.
This 1969 Ram Air IV GTO convertible looks like a straightforward feature from The Brothers Collection, until the comments reveal Pontiac’s official 370-horsepower rating was likely a deliberate understatement to dodge insurance scrutiny. The real number, according to detailed viewer math, is closer to 420. Watch to see the car behind the controversy.
The 1964 Pontiac GTO started life as a loophole in GM’s own corporate rulebook, and the rarest version of it packed three carburetors instead of one. Only a fraction of that first model year’s production carried the Tri-Power option that made the GTO a genuine performance threat. Here’s what separated the base car from the one everyone really wanted, and why a correct restoration is harder than it looks.
Pontiac deleted the GTO’s hidden headlights for 1970, added a rear sway bar, and quietly offered an ultra-rare exhaust option that only 233 cars ever received. A year later, the Judge was gone entirely. Read on to see how the GTO’s final two model years handled the industry’s shift away from raw horsepower.