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A 1970 Ford F-100 Ranger XLT was built to be the comfortable one, the half ton pickup for buyers who wanted brightwork and better seats on top of hauling capability. So a 428 Cobra Jet badge on the fender raises an immediate question, because Ford never offered that engine in a truck. Here is why the swap works so cleanly, what the Cobra Jet actually produced, and why this generation of F-Series became such fertile ground for sleeper builds.
For two straight seasons Carroll Shelby’s 427 Cobra had been embarrassing Corvettes, and by 1966 Chevrolet had run out of patience. The answer was to fit a 427 cubic inch big block into the C2 Sting Ray for the first time, offered in two very different states of tune. One was a strong street engine. The other was a solid lifter, eleven to one compression monster that almost nobody believes was honestly rated, and only 5,258 buyers took it.
Nobody buys a Plymouth Valiant expecting a burnout machine, which is exactly why one shredding its rear tires is so entertaining. Chrysler built this car as sensible economy transportation, then dropped an all new V8 into it in the middle of 1964 and quietly changed what a compact Mopar could be. The engine that started it all stayed in production for decades, and the cars that got it remain some of the last genuinely affordable Chrysler performance out there.
Only 3,754 Corvette buyers in 1967 checked the box for the L71, Chevrolet’s 435-horsepower Tri-Power 427. Ordering one meant giving up the automatic transmission and air conditioning entirely, as though Chevrolet were daring buyers to prove they meant it. This example pairs it with a Muncie four-speed, a Positraction rear end, and side exhaust. Read on for why the L71 is still the C2 collectors chase hardest.
A Dusk Rose 1957 Thunderbird climbing through the Black Hills toward Mount Rushmore sounds like the setup for a breakdown story, but this one carries the Thunderbird Special 312 and both of its tops. Ford built that engine specifically to give the two seat T-Bird a harder edge than the base V8 could manage, and 1957 was the last year the car had only two seats. Here is what made the Special different, and why the final Baby Bird is the one collectors want.
A 1967 Camaro carrying Chevrolet’s ZZ502 crate big block makes 502 horsepower and 567 lb-ft of torque, and none of it came from 1967. The engine was designed decades after the car, yet it drops into the same bay as though it had always belonged there. The hard part of the build is everything behind the engine. Read on for what it takes to make a 502 swap work as well as it sounds.
No prep racing strips away the traction compound that normal drag strips depend on, which turns a thousand-horsepower pass into a wrestling match. A helmet cam mounted inside BoostedGT’s Ford lines up against Flaco’s twin-turbo LSx S10 at No Prep Mayhem in Wichita. Two very different formulas, one very slick surface. Read on for what makes this format so much harder than it looks.
Dodge built the 1968 Dart GTS around a 340 small block, offered a 383 to buyers who wanted more, and flatly refused to put a 440 in the car on its own assembly line. Roughly fifty of them got one anyway, through an outside shop working under Dodge supervision. A clean, documented example is one of the harder cars in the Mopar world to verify. Read on for what to check before you believe the ad copy.
Pete Calandra has owned this 1969 Buick Electra 225 convertible for forty-five years, ever since buying it in the middle of a snowstorm. Now restored in gold paint and shown at World of Wheels in Rosemont, Illinois, the car has been preserved to a condition its owner intends to keep far away from winter roads for good. As Buick’s full-size flagship, the Electra 225 was built for comfort and presence rather than speed, and this one carries a rarer credential than horsepower: a single owner for nearly half a century. Watch to hear the story behind one of the longest-held cars on the show floor.
In the early 1960s, when factory racing was not technically supposed to exist under General Motors’ own corporate policy, a handful of very specific cars still rolled off assembly lines built almost entirely for the drag strip. This 1962 Chevrolet is one of them, and if you did not know to look for it, you would swear it was just another Impala. The debate over exactly what engine it is hiding still is not fully settled. Watch to see why even longtime owners disagree.
Real 1970 Plymouth Superbirds are nearly impossible to buy — Plymouth built fewer than 2,000 to satisfy NASCAR’s homologation rules, and survivors now sell for prices most enthusiasts will never reach. So The Brothers Collection built their own from a plain 1970 Plymouth Satellite, recreating the wing car’s nose cone and towering rear wing on a more attainable platform. Featured on V8TV’s Muscle Car of the Week, the build raises a real question about what a tribute car needs to get right to earn respect. Watch to see how close a handmade Superbird can get to the real thing.
A 1969 Chevelle SS wearing both 396 and 454 badges is telling you two stories at once, and only one of them came from a Chevrolet assembly line. The bigger engine did not reach a Chevelle engine bay until the following model year, which means every car labeled this way has a decision buried somewhere in its history. Here is what Chevrolet actually built in 1969, why the 454 swap became so common, and how to tell which one you are looking at before the money changes hands.
Humberto Garcia of Meadowdale Performance Garage in Carpentersville, Illinois, built his shop around one specific memory: his father bringing home a new Lincoln when Garcia was a boy. This 1972 Continental Mark IV in Rose Diamond Fire Metallic, powered by Ford’s 460-cubic-inch V8, is a showcase of that focus — a personal luxury coupe restored with the same care most shops reserve for muscle cars. Shown in Carpentersville, it makes the case that Lincoln’s design ambition deserves the same collector attention as flashier nameplates. Watch to see why one family’s memory became a whole shop’s specialty.
Mark Klopack of Hot Rod Auto Body Restoration in Schiller Park, Illinois, calls this 1969 Ford Mustang Shelby GT350 an all-original car — a claim that carries real weight in a market full of reproduction panels and patchwork restorations. Finished in Royal Maroon and shown at World of Wheels in Rosemont, the car doubles as a working portfolio piece for Klopack’s shop. As one of the last genuinely Shelby-built GT350s before Ford took the reins in 1970, it’s a car built on pedigree rather than horsepower bragging rights. Watch to see what all-original really means up close.
Hurst planned to build fifty R-Code Mustangs and finished sixteen. That shortfall alone makes this Oxford White and Hurst Gold car one of the rarest modern muscle cars carrying a legendary name, but the Kenne Bell supercharger bolted to its Coyote V8 is the part that separates it from anything a Ford dealer ever sold. A claimed 750 horsepower against a factory rating of 435 is not a tune. It is a different car wearing the same sheet metal.