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At the Volo Auto Museum in rural Illinois, director Brian Grams walks through a 1972 Plymouth Duster finished in Hemi Orange paint and powered by Chrysler’s well-regarded 340 small block V8. It is not the museum’s flashiest car, but the flood of first-car memories it triggered in viewers — from a 1976 Dart Lite to a regretted 1971 Demon — says something about why budget Mopars still matter. Watch to find out what made this compact performance car a museum piece.
A 700-plus horsepower Chevelle convertible, an LS-swapped C10 pickup, a supercharged Hemi Cuda, and a naturally aspirated Ferrari 550 Maranello in the same test drive lineup. Three of them earned their character through modification decades after leaving the factory. One arrived that way. Read on for what separates a restomod from an engineered car, and which of the four actually wins on a back road.
Dropping a modern supercharged Hemi into a 1968 Charger sounds like heresy right up until it fires. This car was the first running, driving vintage muscle car built around a genuine 707-horsepower 6.2-liter Hellcat V8 pulled from a 2015 Dodge Charger SRT, a combination that appeared on no order sheet in 1968 and makes far more power than the original 426 Hemi ever did. Read on to find out what it actually takes to make that swap work.
Spotted at the 2017 Bama Coast Cruise alongside the Metal Brothers’ display, this 1955 Chevrolet Nomad pairs a modern LS-series V8 with a traditional, unrestored-looking interior — built to be driven, not trailered. The video and its comments make the case for why Nomads still command a premium over other Tri-Five wagons, and why station wagons in general remain one of the most underrated entry points into classic Chevrolet ownership.
A 1968 Firebird and a modern Trans Am conversion making 655 horsepower have almost nothing in common except a badge, and on paper the comparison is over before it begins. Swap the keys, though, and the verdict gets far less obvious. Here is what separated Pontiac’s early F-body from its modern namesake, why the older car still wins arguments it should lose on numbers, and what got lost in between.
A 1965 Plymouth wearing rare copper paint and a 426 badge sounds like it should be running the legendary Hemi. It isn’t. A full year before the street Hemi rewrote what that number meant, Plymouth was already building a completely different 426 around a wedge combustion chamber. It lasted two model years before disappearing from the brochures almost entirely. Read on to find out what happened to the other 426.
Only one model year of Corvette ever wore the split rear window, and Chevrolet deleted it after twelve months because the designers and the engineers could not agree. That single detail is why a 1963 Sting Ray coupe carries a premium no other C2 can match, and why building one into a Pro Touring car with an LS3 and side pipes is such a loaded decision. This one crossed the block at Auburn. Read on to find out what that split window actually cost.
A 2015 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat turned up at the Pigeon Forge Rod Run wearing modifications its owner never bothered to explain, parked among hot rods four times its age. The stock car already made 707 horsepower and held an NHRA-certified 11.2-second quarter mile, which makes the question of what got changed more interesting, not less. Here is what that supercharged HEMI actually is, what owners typically do to them first, and why a barely-used car earned a spot at one of the South’s oldest gatherings.
Only about 619 of them were ever built, and the racing driver they were named after had left the brand before the model year was over. The 1968 Mercury Cougar XR7-G began as a tribute to Dan Gurney’s Trans-Am program and ended as a one-year-only special with no factory racing effort left to celebrate. What buyers actually got for their money is stranger than the story behind it. Read on to find out what made this Cougar different.
A 1972 Chevrolet C10 left the factory with an engine that would struggle to merge onto a modern freeway. This one wears Satin Orange paint, 20-inch black chrome wheels, a custom interior, and an LS1 where the tired original small block used to sit. That swap has become so common in the classic truck world that an entire industry exists to support it. Read on to find out why the LS became the default answer and what the 1972 model year means to collectors.
Dropping a 440-cubic-inch big block into a Barracuda meant giving up power steering and power brakes entirely, because there was simply nowhere left to put them. Plymouth did it anyway, and the result was one of the most single-minded muscle cars Detroit ever sold. Here is why the engine barely fit, how few were actually built, what the weight distribution did to the way it drives, and why a well-sorted 440 Cuda still stops a car show cold.
A full-size four-door family Ford that could humiliate a pony car at a stoplight sounds like a contradiction until you find the fine print on a 1965 Galaxie 500 order form. One option code brought two four-barrel Holley carburetors, a solid-lifter camshaft, and compression north of ten to one, all behind a grille identical to every other Galaxie on the lot. Almost nobody checked that box. Read on to find out what Ford was hiding and why so few buyers ever asked.
Shelby American built only a handful of genuine GT350 convertibles in 1966, and they were never meant for the public at all. That scarcity is what makes a carefully assembled tribute car so compelling: start with a real 23,000-mile C-code Mustang convertible, add every genuine Shelby Hi-Po component available, and chase a car that almost nobody alive has ever seen in person. Read on to find out what separates the real four from everything built since.
Ferrari built just 36 examples of the 250 GTO, and the vast majority have spent the decades since locked in private collections rather than being driven hard on a mountain road. That is what makes footage of one actually working so unusual. Here is what is under the bodywork, why the racing record still matters, how the car became the most valuable automobile in the world, and why hearing one at full throttle tells you things no spec sheet can.
V8TV’s Muscle Car Of The Week pulls a 2016 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat from The Brothers Collection, shot with only 35 miles on the odometer. Viewers can’t stop talking about the supercharged whine, with one owner admitting he still smiles every time he starts his up months later. The comments turn into a running debate over Hellcat versus Camaro, versus a 392 Scat Pack Shaker manual, and even a look ahead to the Demon that hadn’t arrived yet. Watch to hear what 707 horsepower actually sounds like from the outside.