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This gold 1970 Chevelle wears SS trim over a 350 bored to 355 cubic inches, an Edelbrock carburetor, headers and a Flowmaster exhaust, plus Vintage Air and 17-inch wheels. It is a genuinely appealing driver, but the 1970 SS package tells a stricter story than most listings admit. Chevrolet did not offer a small block under an SS badge that year. Read on for what that means for the car and its value.
Walk the floor at the Detroit Autorama and you will see hundreds of builds fighting for attention with chrome, candy paint, and glass-smooth bodywork. Then there is the one that does the opposite: flat black, low, and radiating enough menace that one videographer said he approached it carefully. Under that deliberately unglamorous finish sits a genuine Dodge R5 NASCAR-spec engine with no business being in a street car at all. Watch to see why this 1970 Charger stole the show.
A turbocharged Fox Body Mustang making a claimed 1,200 horsepower walked into a Street Car Takeover event and beat a twin turbo Coyote swapped Mustang that ran an 8.21 second quarter mile in the same final. That is a car from the Reagan administration outrunning modern factory engineering on modern tires. The Fox platform keeps producing results like this for reasons that have very little to do with luck, and a great deal to do with weight, architecture, and thirty years of aftermarket development.
Somewhere on I-29, at a heads-up no-prep event, a family hauler with two baby seats in the back lined up against purpose-built race cars, then drove itself home afterward. That alone would be a decent story. But the horsepower number this Dodge Charger Hellcat put down on E85 and bolt-on parts alone is the kind of figure that makes seasoned drag racers do a double take. Watch to see the run, and the reaction times, for yourself.
Tom Lembeck bought two identical 2016 Dodge Charger SRT Hellcats, new, because one apparently was not enough. Each carries 707 horsepower, a supercharged 6.2-liter HEMI, and two key fobs that make it two different cars depending on which one you use. Dodge marketed it as the quickest, fastest, most powerful production sedan in the world. Read on for what makes the four-door version the strangest one in the lineup.
Dodge built just 740 Coronets with the 426 Hemi for 1966, roughly half of them in range-topping Coronet 500 trim, out of only 2,714 Street Hemi cars built across the entire industry that year. The engine existed for one reason: NASCAR homologation demanded Dodge sell a street version of its race motor. This documented low-mileage example is one that survived being used the way most of them were. Read on for how rare a Coronet 500 Hemi actually is.
General Motors capped intermediate-car engines at 400 cubic inches, and Buick’s V8 measured 401. The brand’s answer was to print “400” in the brochures and sell the car anyway. Under the 1965 Skylark Gran Sport’s hood, that nailhead V8 made 325 horsepower and 445 lb-ft of torque, enough to earn the nickname Wildcat 445. Every Gran Sport also rode on the convertible’s reinforced frame, whatever the body style. Read on for how Buick built a muscle car without admitting it.
A 1964 Ford Thunderbird brings a 390-cubic-inch V8, 300 horsepower and 205 inches of deliberate American excess. A 1991 Mazda Miata answers with 116 horsepower, a five-speed manual and a body fifty inches shorter. On paper it looks like a rout in one direction and a joke in the other, but the two cars were never chasing the same target. Read on for the full side-by-side, and which one actually wins the argument it was built to have.
Hot Rod Drag Week is designed to break cars — five days, five tracks, and hundreds of highway miles between quarter-mile passes. One driver in a twin-turbocharged Chevy Nova nicknamed ‘Real Steel’ did not just survive it, he won the whole thing five years running, becoming the first competitor in event history to run both a six-second pass and 200 mph in the same car. Read on to find out what it actually takes to build something that consistent.
Chevrolet’s executives refused to build this car, worried that a compact this light with a 427 under the hood would be impossible to insure. Don Yenko simply moved the whole operation into his own shop instead, ordering L78 396 Novas and swapping in 427 power that made roughly 450 horsepower. Total production is usually put at 37 cars, with only around seven confirmed survivors. This Butternut Yellow example has been with owner Scott Cawley for 35 years. Read on for the full story.
At $3,033, the SS 396 convertible was the only 1967 Chevelle priced above three thousand dollars, and at close to 3,600 pounds it was also the heaviest car in the lineup. Chevrolet then made things stranger by pulling its own 375-horsepower 396 off the order sheet partway through the year, letting only 612 sell once it returned. The light-blue example featured here answers the power question its own way, with a supercharged LS3. Read on for the full story.
The Beach Boys wrote a hit song about a number, and that number was an engine. Chevrolet’s 409 started as a bored-out truck motor, went into just 142 cars before production problems shut the option down, then came back to become one of the most obsessed-over powerplants of the muscle car era. Only 43,775 cars ever received one across its entire run, and the strongest versions made 425 horsepower. Read on for how a stalled-out truck engine became a household name.
Ford advertised the 1967 Shelby GT500 at 355 horsepower, and almost nobody in the industry believed the figure. The engine underneath was never supposed to be there at all, and the number on the spec sheet was arguably the least honest thing Ford printed that year. Only 2,048 were built, in the last season Shelby American assembled the cars entirely in California. Read on for what Ford was really hiding behind that rating.
Chevrolet built roughly 1.7 million cars for 1955, and one body style barely cracked five figures. The two-door Nomad wagon borrowed its ribbed roof and angled tailgate pillars straight from a Corvette-based Motorama show car, then got sold to a public that had no idea it wanted such a thing. Only 8,386 were built that first year, and the commercial failure is precisely what makes survivors so valuable now. Read on for why Chevrolet gambled on a wagon nobody asked for.
A photo of a full-size 1962 Pontiac Catalina lifting its front wheels off the ground has circulated through drag racing circles for over sixty years, and the 405-horsepower 421 Super Duty engine behind that wheelie was no accident. Pontiac built it to win against rivals throwing bigger money at the strip. Read on to find out how a corporate racing ban nearly erased the whole program within a year.