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This 1963 Plymouth Sport Fury doesn’t look like a race car — and that’s the point. Under a conservative full-size body sits Chrysler’s factory 426 Max Wedge, a 415-horsepower dual-quad engine serious enough to have impressed drag racing legend Don Garlits himself. One commenter called it “the Hellcat of its time,” a sleeper built a full year before Pontiac’s GTO popularized the muscle car formula. Watch to see what’s hiding under that Sport Fury badge.
Engineering Explained’s Jason Fenske breaks down what a hemispherical combustion chamber actually is — the dome-shaped design behind Chrysler’s legendary 426 Hemi, and the reason the name became shorthand for raw American power. The real story involves valve geometry, spark plug placement, and a genuine engineering tradeoff most casual fans never learn about. Watch to see why modern Hemi-badged engines aren’t quite what the original name promised.
A dealership straps a brand new GoPro to the dash for one final drive in a 1979 Camaro Z28 before it leaves for a new owner the next morning — and the internet can’t decide what to focus on first. Is it the exhaust note commenters say gives them goosebumps, or the boldly colored interior that’s already become a running joke? One story buried in the comments about a similar Camaro’s tragic fate suggests there’s more riding on this handoff than anyone watching realizes.
A soft yellow 1966 Plymouth Belvedere II with a warm gold interior looks like the mildest car on the lot — until you learn it’s hiding a genuine 426 Hemi and a 4-speed manual transmission underneath. Sourced from The Brothers Collection for Muscle Car of the Week episode 178, this true sleeper is exactly the kind of factory oddity serious Mopar collectors chase. Find out why the comments call it a favorite.
In 1958 Ford launched three entirely new V8 engine families in a single year, named after the divisions they were built to serve: MEL for Mercury-Edsel-Lincoln, FE for Ford-Edsel, and FT for Ford-Truck. They shared oiling systems and bolt patterns but arranged their valves in opposite order, a detail that tells you almost everything about how they were designed. Read on for part one of three, covering how these engines were built and why they lasted until 1976.
In 1969, Plymouth paid Warner Bros. for the rights to a cartoon bird, its signature meep-meep horn, and an entire ad campaign built around outrunning a coyote. This commercial captures that gamble at its peak, arriving the same year the Road Runner won Motor Trend Car of the Year over cars that cost far more. It is proof that a genuinely fast car could still afford to be a little ridiculous. Watch the pitch that convinced a generation of buyers.
Only about 19,000 were ever built, it was the only American two-seater besides the Corvette for three straight years, and it once beat a GTO off the line badly enough that the loser still remembers it fifty years later. The Drive’s /DRIVE+ team goes looking for why AMC’s smallest, lightest muscle car never got its due — and finds a fiercely loyal handful of owners who never stopped arguing it deserved better. What made this car so easy to overlook and so hard to forget?
Long before Chevrolet’s first production-run 1967 Camaros hit dealer lots, one pre-production car, serial number N100001, rolled off the line in May 1966. It was later gutted for racing, nearly lost to history, and eventually restored. A GM engineer’s own firsthand account of spotting an early Camaro on the factory floor adds a rare layer of verification to this story. Watch to see how the very first Camaro almost didn’t survive to tell it.
The Chevy 350 arrived in 1967 as a Camaro-only option making 300 horsepower and left the 1980 Corvette rated at 190. Nothing about the engine got fundamentally worse in those thirteen years, but almost everything around it changed. This installment traces the L-48 through the Camaro, Nova, Impala and Corvette, decodes the block and head casting numbers worth knowing, and explains the VIN character that proves a 1972 Nova SS. Read on for the details.
Ed Wheeldon, known on the drag strip as Fast Eddie, once turned down a $250,000 offer for his 1968 Dodge Dart, a genuine factory Hemi Super Stock he still races at Eddyville Dragway for a $200 appearance fee. Mopar Max Magazine later put him on its cover after the car ran a best pass of 6.501 seconds. Few six-figure Hemi drag cars still see the strip today. Find out why Wheeldon insists on keeping his in the game.
Buick spent most of the 1980s making comfortable sedans and then, in its final year, built a turbocharged six-cylinder that ran a 13.2-second quarter and beat V8s that cost far more. The 1987 Grand National and the 547 GNX units that followed it were the last of the line, assembled in part by an outside performance house, and factory rated at a number almost nobody believed. Read on for what separated a WE4 from a GNX, and what a $35 option got you.
A 74-year-old retired Ford technician built a private collection of more than 200 cars on his own rural Michigan property, and now a township ordinance is forcing him to sell or scrap 20 of them every month. Ron Dauzet says the pace has turned his passion into a race against the clock, with officials checking his progress in person each month. Two years and roughly 180 cars later, he’s still not done, and not every car has gone to a buyer who wanted it.
Everyone associates the Dodge Viper with its brutal V-10 engine, but TFLcar’s Viper Week dig into the car’s origin uncovers a detail that surprises even longtime Mopar fans: the very first Viper concept wasn’t built around a V-10 at all. The name almost went a different direction too. This origin story traces exactly how a stripped-down concept car became one of America’s most uncompromising sports cars.
1970 marked the final year of high-compression muscle before emissions regulations and an unleaded fuel mandate changed everything — and this breakdown argues the real winner of that last great year came from an unexpected place. The Buick GS 455 Stage 1 quietly out-torqued nearly every rival on the market, backed up by a factory performance package most people never associated with Buick. One recent owner’s comment about a first ride with his daughter says it all.
Henry Ford quietly built at least eight boats in the early 1920s, and the last survivor, named Evangeline, carried a 450-horsepower V12 engine repurposed from a World War I fighter plane. It reportedly hit 49 mph in 1924, fast enough to outrun dedicated race boats of the day, before a fire at the Gold Cup ended Ford’s interest in racing on water for good.