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Chevrolet built the Chevy II because the Corvair could not beat the Ford Falcon, and it built it fast — a full range of five body styles and four trim levels, on a wheelbase deliberately half an inch longer than the Falcon’s. Then drag racers noticed how little it weighed, and a dealer-installed V8 changed the plot entirely. Read on to find out how a compact economy car ended up in the same conversation as the GTO.
The Series 2 Lotus Elise failed its U.S. headlight regulations and failed the 5 mph impact test, and it was sold in America anyway — under a three-year exemption. It went on to become what many consider the finest Lotus ever built, running a Toyota engine with a cylinder head designed by Yamaha. Read on to find out how a company famous for adding lightness ended up 187 pounds heavier and still faster than before.
A German Formula One driver once drove a Porsche 550 Spyder underneath a closed railway crossing gate during a race, without slowing down. That is how low the car sat, and part of why a 1,498cc four-cylinder could humiliate machinery with twice the displacement. Then James Dean bought chassis number 55, had a name painted on the trunk lid, and turned a race car into something else entirely. Read on for the whole story.
A Plymouth Cuda and a Chevy S10 pickup should not belong in the same drag racing conversation, but both of these builds run genuine 10-second quarter miles at Palm Beach International Raceway. One is a muscle car icon pushed well past factory spec, the other is an unglamorous compact truck turned sleeper. Watch two completely different paths to the same performance number collide on the same night.
Only three Caterham R500 EVOs were ever built, and each one cost 42,000 British pounds — around $69,000 — without a heater or any other comfort you might reasonably expect. One of them went out and left a Ferrari Enzo behind. The Enzo cost roughly ten times as much. Read on to find out how a company that started with a Lotus parts license ended up embarrassing Maranello.
Larry F. bought his first car in 1977 for $400: a white 1970 Pontiac GTO that broke his father’s one rule about first cars. He spent two years rebuilding it, drove it for years, and sold it in 1988 for $800 before the muscle car market took off. Years later, walking through an Illinois junkyard with his son, he found out exactly what became of it. Read on to find out what he saw.
Buick’s turbocharged 3.8 liter V6 should have ended when the Regal went front wheel drive in 1988, but this final episode of OldCarMemories.com’s series tracks its unexpected last stop: a 1989 Pontiac Trans Am. The engine used Pontiac heads instead of Buick’s own and reportedly paced the Indy 500 as a genuinely stock car, a first. Watch to see how a mid size sedan engine ended up the fastest thing on a GM showroom floor.
POWERNATION’s Detroit Muscle crew takes on Project Ultra Violet, a 1970 Dodge Challenger so rusted it needs sandblasting before the real work can even begin. What follows is a uni-body-to-full-frame conversion built around a Jeff Schwartz G-Machine chassis and a low-deck, all-aluminum Hemi backed by a T56 six-speed. This is not a preserved survivor — it’s a genuine rust-bucket resurrection. Watch to see how far the team pushes it.
Ask ten muscle car fans to name the greatest of all time and you will get eleven answers and one argument. A reader poll settled it once, and the results are stranger than you would expect: the car that finished first was never designed to race, and the car with the highest horsepower rating finished second. Read on for the full countdown and the numbers behind each placing.
By 1976 the horsepower war was over and Detroit had lost. Pontiac marked its fiftieth anniversary with a black and gold Trans Am that looked far faster than it was, and then its engineers did something nobody else in the industry managed that decade: they made the numbers go back up. Read on to find out which two sets of cylinder heads they used to do it.
The Dodge Challenger name has worn a lot of different cars over the decades — a 426 Hemi-powered muscle icon in 1970, a rebadged Mitsubishi import by 1978, and an 840-horsepower factory drag weapon by 2018. This video runs through all of it back to back, and the comment section reacts to every twist. Watch to see just how far one nameplate traveled.
The combustion chamber that made Chrysler famous was never Chrysler’s invention, and the company’s first hemispherical engine was not designed for a car at all. It was drawn for a fighter plane, then refined in a tank, and it reached showrooms in 1951 wearing a name that had nothing to do with geometry. Read on to find out how a wartime experiment became the most valuable four letters in American performance.
This 1967 Camaro pairs a deceptively restrained exterior and factory houndstooth interior with a 502-horsepower ZZ502 crate engine, filmed in detail at Fast Lane Classic Cars in Missouri. A Borg Warner four-speed and 12-bolt rear handle the power, while front disc brakes and modern tires keep it planted. Commenters can’t stop calling it a dream car. Watch the full walkaround to see what 502 horsepower looks like in a car that doesn’t announce itself.
A 1970 Hemi Cuda, one of just 652 built with the 426 that year, lines up against an even rarer 1967 Hemi Coronet R/T, one of the earliest street-legal Hemi cars Dodge ever sold. Both cars share the same legendary Elephant engine, which means this is less a brand rivalry than a family argument about which chassis and gearing made better use of it. Viewers in the comments have already nicknamed both cars the asphalt elephants. Watch the run and see which body style actually won the argument.
This tribute build channels the fastback Mustang known as Eleanor from 2000’s ‘Gone in 60 Seconds,’ finished in the film’s Pepper Gray with GT500-style stripes and a wide-body stance — but the real story is how many different cars have carried that name. From the barely-remembered 1971 Mach 1 of the 1974 original to the Bullitt Mustang comparisons in the comments, this build sits at the center of a decades-long debate among Mustang fans. Watch the full build and see where it lands.