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This 1965 Chevrolet Impala SS carries the rare RPO L78 396 engine, factory-rated at 425 horsepower and backed by a 4-speed manual — a combination that may survive in as few as five convertible examples today. Two commenters share their own family histories with the exact same drivetrain. Watch for the burnout at the end that one viewer calls the king of all time.
Long before Hollywood made it famous in Bullitt and The Dukes of Hazzard, the 1968-1970 Dodge Charger R/T had already earned its reputation the hard way — with a 440 Magnum standard, an optional 426 Hemi, and a coke-bottle body that still defines muscle car styling today. Read on for what the R/T badge actually meant under the sheet metal.
This 1967 Pontiac GTO started its restoration looking, in one viewer’s words, like it had been dragged out of a swamp — rusted through and barely recognizable. V8 Speed and Resto Shop’s frame-off rebuild brought it back to its factory-correct Tyrol Blue, complete with its original Pontiac 400 four-barrel V8 and every factory comfort option intact, before unveiling it at the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals. Watch the full transformation from swamp find to show winner.
Pontiac’s engineers had exactly one model year, 1971, to keep the Trans Am feeling like a genuine performance car just as emissions regulations began squeezing horsepower across the entire industry. This episode of V8TV’s Muscle Car of the Week digs into the functional shaker scoop, the 455 HO big-block, and a wider color palette that included Lucerne Blue alongside the more common white. One family that has owned six different Firebirds across two decades still calls their white ’71 the favorite. Watch to find out why this specific year keeps winning the argument.
One engineer’s mid-1950s design decision still echoes through Chevrolet engines built today. From the original 265-cubic-inch Turbo-Fire V8 through the 283, 327, and 350, Ed Cole’s small-block architecture became the corporate standard across nearly every GM division. Read on to trace how a single engine family shaped more than 60 years of Chevrolet performance.
A numbers-matching 1970 Hemicuda living with an Italian Mopar collector gets taken out for a shaky, handheld drive test that has nothing to do with production values and everything to do with the sound of a 426 Hemi running through an A833 four-speed. The build stays remarkably close to factory spec, stock exhaust, stock carbs, stock clutch, with only a comp cam and forged pistons as real departures. Commenters cannot stop talking about how the driver shifts, and about the engine note itself. Watch for both.
Four years without a new Camaro on dealer lots should have been the end of the story. Instead, a 2006 concept car reveal quietly locked in a production decision that brought the nameplate back for 2010 with a track-only preview year first. Read on to see how the fifth-generation Camaro went from concept stage to a 580-horsepower ZL1 flagship.
Ford’s fifth-generation Mustang solved a problem the company had struggled with for years: how to modernize an icon without losing what made it iconic in the first place. Built on an all-new platform but styled after the fastback Mustangs of the late 1960s, the 2005 redesign set the template every American pony car would follow for the next decade. Read on for the engineering decisions behind the comeback.
Jay Leno owns more than 180 vehicles, but when The Drive asked him to pick his favorite American muscle cars, he skipped the obvious answers entirely. His list includes a 1971 Dodge Challenger, a Ford Galaxie 500 with a forgotten 7-liter engine, a 1,000-horsepower Oldsmobile Toronado, and a crate-engined Buick Roadmaster sleeper. Every pick rewards a level of car knowledge most muscle car fans do not have. See exactly why Leno chose these four over anything more obvious.
A small-block Dodge Demon 340 squares off against a big-block Camaro in a quarter-mile grudge match that turns into a genuine wheelstand, the Demon’s front end clawing skyward as both cars fight for traction off the line. Commenters are still arguing over whether outspending an opponent’s engine build counts as a real win, and at least one former Demon 340 owner shows up in the replies to defend the underdog. The gap between the two cars’ elapsed times tells its own story. Watch to see how it plays out.
Dennis Ermi’s 1968 Plymouth Road Runner wears a custom Pearlescent Orange and Black paint job and hides a 472-cubic-inch big-block built to make somewhere around 1,000 horsepower, numbers that have nothing to do with the nameplate’s budget-muscle-car reputation. Ermi has owned the car since 2009 and built it up gradually, the paint and engine work both added well after purchase. Viewers keep coming back to one detail in particular: the blower whine. Watch to hear it for yourself.
For a few short years at the end of the 1960s, win on Sunday, sell on Monday pushed Ford, Mercury, Dodge, and Plymouth into a genuine aerodynamic arms race, producing cars as strange-looking as they were fast — this MotorWeek retro review rounds up the Torino, Cyclone, Charger, and the wildest of them all, the wing-and-nose-cone Plymouth Superbird. One commenter still remembers passing on a Limelight green Superbird back in 1985, long before it became a six-figure collector car. Watch to see the machines NASCAR eventually had to legislate off the track.
A 1967 Ford Fairlane GT and a 1969 Plymouth GTX go head to head at Palm Beach International Raceway, and the gap between them, 11.41 versus 11.25 seconds, turns out to be closer than the numbers suggest. Both owners showed up in the comments to keep the argument going years later. Watch the quarter mile that started a rivalry neither driver has let go of since.
Backspeed Boys set out to build a 650-horsepower LS engine, and by their own account it turned into something closer to a dare than a spec sheet. Viewers who watched it come together compared the assembly to snapping together oversized Legos — until the finished engine made the chassis visibly twist under its own torque during the dyno pull. Built around a forged Eagle rotating assembly and no shortage of machine shop time, this is what happens when a familiar platform gets pushed past its comfortable ceiling.
The Chevrolet Impala carries a name borrowed from an African antelope and a backstory that started as a Corvette-inspired concept car nobody expected to reach production. From a 1956 Motorama prototype to becoming America’s best-selling car by 1965, the Impala’s rise wasn’t guaranteed at any step along the way. Read on to see how a styling sketch turned into one of the longest-running nameplates in Chevrolet history.