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The 1957 Thunderbird could be ordered with a McCulloch-Paxton supercharger and up to 340 horsepower, which made it the fastest and most desirable two-seater Ford had ever sold. It was also the last. Robert McNamara had already decided what the 1958 car would be, and the styling department drew the entire thing before a single engineer was consulted. Read on to find out why the decision that infuriated the faithful turned out to be right.
This freshly restored 1969 Boss 429, brought to Jay Leno’s Garage by Anghel Restorations, exists because Ford needed exactly 500 street-legal examples to homologate its NASCAR engine for competition. Fitting the oversized 429 required an outside contractor to rebuild the Mustang’s own engine bay. The result remains one of the rarest, most sought-after Mustangs Ford ever built. Watch to hear the full story behind the engineering headache.
Chrysler had a problem in 1968: the Plymouth Road Runner was selling so well that the Dodge division was watching the money go past its own showroom windows. The answer arrived at the Detroit auto show wearing a bee on its tail and carrying the lowest price tag in the Dodge lineup. Only 125 buyers ticked the one box that turned it into something else entirely. Read on to find out which one.
Ford’s official records say the Boss 302 ended after 1970, which makes this surviving 1971 example something that technically shouldn’t exist. Jerry Heasley tracks down the story behind a car discovered through an eBay listing rather than any collector network, likely a factory prototype or pre-production test car. The restoration that followed only adds to its rarity. Watch to see how a car outside Ford’s own history books turned up for sale online.
This TorRed 1970 Plymouth Superbird carries one of muscle car history’s stranger stories: a NASCAR-bred aero warrior with a 426 Hemi under the hood that once served as a getaway car in a Reno casino heist. V8TV’s Brothers Collection walkaround traces both its racing pedigree and its brush with crime before its restoration. The wing and nose cone alone make it unmistakable. Watch to see how a car built to be seen ended up in a story about trying not to be.
A random online post about a car sitting in someone’s barn led The Auto Archaeologist to a 1967 Mercury Comet Caliente most muscle car fans have never heard of, let alone seen. This particular example carries the R-code designation, meaning a factory 427 with dual four-barrels and a four-speed manual, verified in an original Hot Rod magazine feature. Even dedicated Mercury enthusiasts often assume this configuration is more legend than reality. Watch to see what a genuine, forgotten piece of Mercury muscle car history looks like today.
The 2024 Ford Mustang Dark Horse keeps the naturally aspirated V8 flagship formula alive with a specially tuned 5.0-liter Coyote engine and an active exhaust system offering four distinct sound modes. This video from The Fast Lane Car walks through quiet, normal, sport, and track settings, letting the exhaust note speak for itself. The escalation had commenters cracking jokes about the neighbors. Watch to hear exactly how loud track mode really gets.
This 1969 Shelby GT350 keeps its factory body and interior exactly as they left the assembly line, while a 408 stroker motor quietly replaces the original 351 under the hood. American Legends Hot Rods in Phoenix built the swap specifically to balance driveability with visual originality, a philosophy that divides collectors but keeps cars like this one on the road instead of in a trailer. The burgundy paint without stripes is a deliberate departure from the expected Shelby look. Watch to hear what a 408 stroker sounds like in a fifty-year-old body.
Mark Worman of Graveyard Carz built his reputation on numbers-matching originality, which makes his involvement with this 1970 Plymouth Superbird tribute worth paying attention to. Under the legendary wing and nose cone sits Mopar’s Hellcrate, a 707-horsepower supercharged crate HEMI built for exactly this kind of plug-and-play swap. Several viewers reported starting their own Hellcrate builds after watching this reveal. Watch to see what happens when a fifty-year-old NASCAR homologation special meets modern crate-engine power.
Ford built fewer than 20 examples of this exact combination: a 429 Super Cobra Jet, the factory drag pack, a four-speed manual, bench seating, and a convertible body, all wrapped in black paint with a red laser stripe. This 1970 Torino GT is exactly the kind of low-production oddity that Muscle Car of the Week was built to spotlight. Longtime Ford enthusiasts rarely get to see a build sheet this unusual restored and running. Watch to see why this convertible stands apart from every other Torino GT.
General Motors banned its divisions from racing in 1963, which should have ended Pontiac’s performance program on the spot. Instead, a handful of engineers found a loophole in the rulebook and shipped a 389-cubic-inch coupe as an option package on a mid-size Tempest. Management capped it at 5,000 units because they were certain nobody wanted another muscle car. Read on to find out how badly they misjudged it.
A 1969 SC/Rambler and a 1968 AMX, both built by American Motors Corporation and both packing the exact same 315-horsepower 390 V8, meet in a quarter-mile race decided almost entirely by rear gearing. AMC loyalists in the comments are still defending both cars against decades of being overlooked by bigger Detroit names. Watch two underdog muscle cars settle an argument that started the same year they were built.
Rory Carroll edits Autoweek from Detroit, but his own car story starts in the orchards of northern Michigan and runs straight through a welded-shut door at the 24 Hours of Lemons. In this conversation with host Pat Caporuscio, Carroll traces his path from a cherry-country childhood to one of the industry’s most recognized editorial chairs, and explains why an editor who still races tells a different kind of story. Read on to find out what shaped his eye for the muscle car world.
From 1966 to 1969, the Pontiac Beaumont was sold only in Canada, nearly identical to a Chevrolet Chevelle, right down to a shared 396 big block, but distinguished by little more than its tail lights. The range-topping Sport Deluxe became 396-only for its final two years, and just 65 convertibles were built in 1968, every one of them with the big block. Read on to find out why Canadian winters made this rare Chevelle twin even harder to find today.
Pontiac never sold the Tempest in Canada, so GM built an entirely separate nameplate to fill the gap: the Acadian, a Chevy II underneath wearing no Pontiac or Chevrolet badge at all, sold through Pontiac-Buick dealerships from 1962 to 1971. It was exported as far as Chile and South Africa, spun off its own Beaumont sub-model onto the Chevelle platform, and quietly outlasted most people’s memory of it ever existing. Read on to find out how a domestic-content law created one of GM’s strangest badge-engineering stories.