Owner Jeffrey Filz grew up two blocks from the Kenosha plant that built this 1970 AMC Javelin SST Mark Donohue Signature Edition, and the comments below Lou Costabile’s video turn up an even wilder story: a commenter’s father, a former Spitfire pilot, briefly owned one himself. Watch the full walkaround and engine start.
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Road Test TV lines up two of Chrysler’s rarest factory muscle cars, a 1968 Plymouth Road Runner and a 1968 Dodge Super Bee, both fitted with the legendary 426 Hemi, for a naturally aspirated quarter-mile grudge match. The comments reveal an audience less interested in who wins than in celebrating two genuine Mopar icons running clean 11-second passes. Watch to see how two of Detroit’s most feared engines settle a very friendly family argument.
Pontiac officially rated the 1969 GTO Ram Air IV at 370 horsepower — and deliberately lied about it. This episode of Muscle Car Of The Week features a rare Ram Air IV 400, four-speed GTO convertible from The Brothers Collection, loaded with options seldom seen together. The comments reveal why Pontiac’s real output was closer to 420-430 horsepower, and how an internal weight-to-power directive, aimed at dodging insurance rate hikes, kept the true number off the window sticker. Watch to see the car behind the number that was never supposed to be accurate.
When the California Highway Patrol specified a pursuit car in 1961, the requirement was brutal: 100 miles per hour sustained for a full hour in 100-degree heat, without failure. Jay Leno’s Garage brings in a fully restored 1961 Dodge Polara built to exactly that spec, courtesy of restorers Morgan Yates and Dave Skaien of the Automobile Club of Southern California. The comments add real memories from CHP families and desert truckers who lived through that same era. Watch to see what it actually took to build a car for that job.
A third-generation Camaro doesn’t usually get much respect in muscle car circles, but one owner’s IROC-Z, featured here by The Drive, might be the car that changes that. Built with years of restraint instead of loud mods — factory badging intact, no stripe graphics, only the wheels giving it away — it’s what the crew calls the absolute perfect version of a car most people already wrote off. The comments turn into a flood of childhood memories about parents’ IROCs and Z28s. Watch to see what makes this one different.
Ford built the Boss 351 for exactly one model year before discontinuing the entire Boss lineup — just 1,806 were made. Jeff Ball’s example, finished in Ford’s short-lived Grabber Lime and shown at the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals in Rosemont, Illinois, is the rare kind of Boss most enthusiasts have only read about. Under the narrow-windowed 1971 bodywork sits a 351 Cleveland V8 that some owners call the quickest of the three Boss Mustangs. Watch to see why this one-year-only Ford still divides opinion decades later.
This 1967 Chevrolet Camaro carries build number N100001 — the very first unit off Chevrolet’s Norwood, Ohio assembly line. Along the way it was stripped down and turned into a race car, a fate that erased the history of countless early Camaros before it. What saved this one was a single decision: whoever converted it kept the original parts instead of scrapping them, making a true, numbers-matching restoration possible decades later. Watch to see how a factory-first Camaro survived its own history.
Step into the jet age with Cadillac’s Series 62 from 1954 to 1956, where luxury meets aerodynamic audacity! The ’54 model dropped a few pounds—vertically—and flaunted a wraparound Eldorado windshield, making heads turn faster than its 17.5-second 0-60 mph. In ’55, Cadillac added tubeless tires and a “hockey stick” chrome trim, boosting sales to a record 118,190. By ’56, the Series 62 had a grill fancier than a Michelin-starred meal and could sprint to 60 mph in a brisk, for its size, 12 seconds.
The second-generation El Camino (1964-1967) was a Chevelle’s twin, chopped at the B-pillars to create a utility vehicle with a flair for power. Starting modestly with six-cylinder engines, it quickly beefed up with V8 muscle, peaking at a 396-cubic-inch beast by ’67. It evolved with each model year, from power boosts to snazzy upgrades like a collapsible steering column and front disc brakes. By 1967, it was a stylish workhorse, versatile enough for hauling hay or hustling on the highway.
For 1970, Ford promoted Torino to the top of its mid-size lineup and spread it across seventeen different models, from a basic wagon to the single-engine Torino Cobra fastback. Coke-bottle styling, a new competition suspension package, and interior updates reshaped the range from top to bottom. Read on to find out what Motor Trend meant by calling the Cobra “completely different.”
Somewhere in the 1980s, the boxy, sharp-edged shapes that defined an entire generation of American cars quietly disappeared, replaced within about a decade by the curves nearly every car still wears today. Vox traces the shift back to a specific Ford sedan, a wind tunnel, and fuel economy rules that made drag coefficient a bottom-line issue for every automaker. The explanation has almost nothing to do with changing taste.
Tim Allen opens up his private garage for GQ’s Car Collectors series, and it’s less a display of exotics than a decades-deep collection of authentic American iron — including a 1965 Shelby Cobra S/C and a 1933 Ford Roadster he built himself during Home Improvement’s run. Watch to see why this collection reflects the man more than the market.
A rotted-out 1970 Dodge Challenger becomes Project Ultra Violet in this POWERNATION Detroit Muscle build. The crew brings in chassis builder Jeff Schwartz for a full-frame conversion, grafts in a low-deck aluminum Hemi and a Tremec six-speed, and finishes it off with metallic purple paint and graphics from builder Chris Ryan. Watch to see how a shell most shops would have scrapped becomes a genuinely modern resto-mod.
A vintage road test puts a 1969 Dodge Charger 500 — Dodge’s NASCAR homologation special, built to fix the standard Charger’s high-speed aerodynamics — through its paces with the 426 Hemi under the hood. Announcer Bud Lindeman narrates in period broadcast style, and the comments are full of viewers’ own Hemi street stories. Watch to hear the line that’s still quoted decades later.
Ford’s 1962 Thunderbird Sports Roadster used a clever fiberglass tonneau cover to disguise a genuine four-seat convertible as a two-seat sports car, right down to spoke wire wheels and special fender badges. Check the right option box and Ford would add Tri-Power carburetion to the 390 V8, bumping output to a genuine 340 horsepower — but only 120 buyers ever did, out of 1,427 Sports Roadsters built that year. Historians estimate barely 40 of those M-code cars survive today, making this one of the rarest factory options of the entire early Thunderbird generation.
