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Tim Allen’s 1968 Camaro isn’t a movie prop — it’s a 505-horsepower 427 COPO build from Bodie Stroud, constructed to be exactly the car Allen wanted as a teenager and couldn’t afford. Jay Leno gets behind the wheel to see if it lives up to the hype, and Allen’s face during the burnout says everything words couldn’t. This is car-guy comfort food.
The third-generation Corvette ran for fifteen model years without a full redesign, longer than any generation before or since, while watching horsepower ratings collapse under new emissions rules almost the entire time it was on sale. Read on to find out how a car built on a Mako Shark II concept survived that transition — and which rare option is worth more than most entire classic cars.
A 1965 Ford F100 sat forgotten under a stand of trees for years before its new owners realized what they’d inherited with the property. No brakes, a stubborn shifter, and decades of neglect should have meant a dead truck — instead, the old six-cylinder fired right up. Find out what kept it alive for half a century.
Pontiac’s second-generation Trans Am was supposed to launch with the rest of the 1970 lineup, but tooling delays pushed it to a February 26 debut — creating a “1969 1/2” nickname collectors still use today. From the Ram Air III and IV through the emissions-fighting SD-455 and the shrinking engine lineup of the mid-1970s, the Trans Am’s first six years tell the story of muscle car performance colliding head-on with new safety and emissions law. Read on to see how the numbers changed year by year.
Pontiac built fewer than 700 first-year Trans Ams in 1969, and this white-with-blue-stripes example, restored by a specialist shop and shown at the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals, is one of the survivors. Owner John Steger walks through what made the earliest Trans Am different from everything that came after. It’s a rare look at where the nameplate actually began.
Everyone knows the GTO and the Chevelle SS, but Car News TV went looking for the muscle cars history left behind — and found seven, including a Buick Wildcat whose custom wheels have viewers arguing in the comments to this day. One commenter even jumped in to defend his own 401-cubic-inch, four-speed AMC Javelin AMX as faster than half the cars on the list. Watch to see which forgotten machines made the cut.
When Dodge announced the Viper’s production would end after 2017, it closed out twenty-five years built almost entirely around one uncompromising idea: a V10 engine with no substitute. This video makes the case for what could have kept America’s last V10 sports car alive. The comment section is still arguing about whether it would have worked.
In 1967, Chevrolet borrowed a primetime sitcom witch to help sell a brand-new Camaro that, ironically, was mostly bought with a base inline-six and a three-speed. The commercial folds Bewitched’s magic into GM’s era-defining options culture, where practically everything on the car was a paid extra. It’s a strange, charming piece of Detroit advertising history.
A 1969 Dodge Daytona and a 1970 Plymouth Superbird — two of NASCAR’s most extreme aero-warrior street cars — sit side by side in one Jacksonville owner’s garage. Both wear the wing and nosecone combination that solved a real aerodynamic problem at 120-plus miles per hour, not just a styling flourish. Find out which one the owner says deserves the edge.
Audi’s R8 shares its bones with the Lamborghini Gallardo and earned praise from Le Mans legend Jacky Ickx before it ever reached production — but the factory version turned out to be just the starting point. German tuner MTM pushed the R8 and its closest sibling in two wildly different directions: a twin-engine Bimoto built from an Audi TT pushing over 1,000 combined horsepower, and a stripped, roll-caged R8 Clubsport capable of 225 mph. Read on to find out how far one platform can really be pushed.
For 1972 Ford rebuilt the Torino from the frame up, moved it onto a full perimeter chassis, softened the ride, and killed off the Cobra that had defined the car’s performance image. The result was heavier and slower, yet it became the most famous Torino of all, thanks to Hollywood and a decade of television. Read on to find out what changed under the skin, what was left of the muscle, and why this last generation still matters.
Episode 184 of Muscle Car of the Week features a showroom-fresh, triple-black 1971 Buick GS 455 Stage 1 convertible — one of the highest-torque muscle cars Detroit built that year, wrapped in a color combination viewers still call ‘sweet’ decades later. Commenters are already asking whether a Buick Grand National might be hiding in the same collection. Watch to see what else made this car Buick’s cleanest case for muscle and luxury coexisting.
New EPA fuel rules hit every muscle car in 1971, but the Oldsmobile 4-4-2 absorbed the changes better than most, holding onto a genuine 350-horsepower W-30 option even as compression ratios dropped across the industry. Read on to see how Oldsmobile’s answer to the GTO adapted to a rulebook nobody in Detroit had faced before.
Plymouth only offered this exact combination for a few months before moving on, which is precisely why the A12 Road Runner remains one of the most talked-about mid-year muscle cars ever built. Wearing Vitamin C Orange paint straight from The Brothers Collection, this particular 440 Six Barrel car represents a stopgap Chrysler engineered on the fly to answer a very specific rival. Watch to find out what problem this car was actually built to solve.