Latest Posts Under: Videos
You found it — a 1967 Corvette Sting Ray sitting in a garage, dusty but complete, priced thousands below what a finished example sells for. The math looks obvious: buy it cheap, do the restoration yourself, and end up with a six-figure classic for a fraction of the price. Then you talk to a shop that has restored hundreds of these cars, and the math stops looking so obvious. A proper frame-off restoration on a C2 Corvette can run 1,000 to 1,200 labor hours before a single part gets ordered, and once paint, trim, and mechanical work are added in, the total routinely clears $100,000. The bargain project sitting in that garage might only be a bargain if you already know exactly what condition it’s really in — and that’s the part most buyers get wrong. Here’s what separates a smart buy from an expensive lesson.
AMC handed part of the 1971 Javelin AMX’s styling to its own Trans-Am champion, Mark Donohue, and the result carried real racing pedigree straight into its sheet metal. With a 330-horsepower 401 V8, a factory Go Package, and a championship season nobody else in Detroit even bothered to contest, it remains one of the most overlooked muscle cars of its era.
A New Jersey car owner named Mario Rossi refused to accept a NASCAR rule that was supposed to end his Dodge Daytona program for good. So he built the smallest engine the rulebook allowed and sent it out to embarrass the sport’s biggest teams. What happened next has stayed a Mopar racing secret for over 50 years.
A 1968 Chevrolet Camaro street machine carries the second-year styling changes most people miss, and underneath there was an SS package that could be ordered with a big block strong enough to end arguments at a stoplight. Chevrolet built well over two hundred thousand Camaros that year and changed almost nothing, which turned out to be the right call. Read on to find out what separates a 1968 from the car that launched the nameplate.
Oldsmobile had no budget, no big engine, and only months to catch Pontiac’s GTO — so its engineers answered with a suspension package nobody else in Detroit was offering. Here’s how a new 400-cubic-inch Rocket V8 and a factory rear sway bar turned the underdog 4-4-2 into the car period testers actually preferred.
