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In 2017, the final model year for the Dodge Viper, driver Dominik Farnbacher took the track-focused ACR-Extreme around the Nurburgring Nordschleife and posted an official lap of 7:03.45, one of the fastest times ever recorded by a car under $400,000. No turbo, no hybrid assist, just a naturally aspirated V10 and a manual gearbox. Watch the full lap that closed out the Viper’s legacy.
A 1973 Plymouth Barracuda could never have left the factory with a 426 Hemi under the hood, because Chrysler had already killed the engine two years earlier. That makes this performance-built tribute car something other than a fake, and Mopar collectors have long treated cars like it as legitimate in their own right. Behind the Hemi sits a 727 TorqueFlite, a Dana 60 with 4.11 gears, and Wilwood discs. Read on to find out why the combination works.
Jack Chrisman’s 1965 Mercury Comet — the altered-wheelbase car credited with launching NHRA’s fuel Funny Car division — turns up on static display at the 2017 Southeast Gassers Association Knoxville event, owned by the family behind Barillaro Speed Emporium. One commenter adds firsthand history, having grown up at Lions and Irwindale and even met Chrisman’s son. See the car that made stock-bodied Mercury look deceptively ordinary.
This 1963 Mercury Comet was bought new at a Tyler, Texas dealership in May 1963 and driven by the same owner into her nineties, accumulating just 45,000 miles along the way. What makes it genuinely uncommon is not the mileage but the order sheet: a base sedan optioned with both the 260 V8 and air conditioning, a combination almost nobody chose. Read on to find out why that pairing was so rare and what it means today.
This show-quality 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air has covered just 42 miles since its restoration, and almost nothing under the skin is what General Motors installed. A 1969 Corvette 350 replaced the original small block, an overdrive automatic sits where a Powerglide once did, and the car now stops on power front discs it never had. The result is a Tri-Five that looks period-correct and drives like it was built this decade. Read on to find out what changed and why it matters.
This 1969 Chevelle looks like a clean pro-touring build until you notice the pair of 76mm turbochargers feeding an all-aluminum 540-cubic-inch big block. Underneath sits a Roadster Shop chassis and Detroit Speed suspension, because a fifty-six-year-old body shell cannot handle this kind of power on factory bones. The combination points to four figures of horsepower in a car that still wears its original silhouette. Read on to find out what it takes to build one.
A viral compilation of street racers colliding with police, some clips pure comedy, others carrying real consequences, has racked up over 11 million views and just as many arguments in the comments. One driver challenges an unmarked Dodge Challenger without realizing it. Another incident, a commenter says, ended in an eight-year prison sentence. Watch to see which moments are funny and which ones are not.
Ford built the Boss 302 engine to satisfy a rulebook, not a showroom, and almost everyone remembers the Mustang that carried it. Far fewer remember that Mercury put the same engine in a Cougar, wearing an Eliminator badge and built in numbers small enough that most enthusiasts have never seen one in person. Read on to find out why Mercury’s version stayed in the shadows.
Jeff Tittle kept his 1970 Chevrolet Nova looking exactly like the plain granny car it was built as, while quietly stuffing a 355 small block, a Super T-10 four speed, and a 9 inch Ford rear underneath. RamblinAround caught the car at a local show, and the moment it fires up, the sleeper act falls apart fast. Watch to hear just how much noise a car this unassuming can actually make.
Ken Becker has owned this red-and-black 1956 Buick Special for twenty-five years, long enough that he describes it as a member of the family. The Special was the cheapest Buick you could buy, which makes it easy to overlook and wrong to dismiss. It carried a 322 nailhead V8, and its body style had helped introduce one of Detroit’s genuine styling breakthroughs. Read on for what the entry-level Buick got right.
Ford’s own paperwork undersold this 1969 Mustang GT the moment it left the factory. The 428 Cobra Jet carried an official 335-horsepower rating that engineers knew was fiction, chosen to keep the car out of the insurance industry’s crosshairs. Add a convertible body, a rare Indian Fire paint code, and a factory power top, and you have a combination Ford built fewer than thirty times. The registry that tracks them can confirm four survivors.
Only 50 examples of the Shelby Terlingua Mustang exist, and Lou Costabile got a personal walkaround of this yellow one straight from Shelby American’s President and Vice President of Operations at the company’s Las Vegas facility. The name traces back to the 1967 SCCA Trans-Am Championship win, and the exclusivity shows in every detail the two executives point out on camera. Watch to see what separates this build from the other 49.
GM design chief Bill Mitchell wanted a full-size luxury coupe with the drama of a 1930s speedster, and the boattail Riviera is what happened. He modeled its tapered tail on the 1963 Corvette Sting Ray he considered his masterpiece, then watched the shape get stretched across a much larger body. Mitchell himself later admitted the result looked less like a speedboat than a tugboat. This 1973 example, the last year of the design, went through Count’s Kustoms.
Plymouth built the Road Runner on a contrarian idea: strip out the luxury everyone else was adding, keep the price low, and let an enormous engine do the talking. Sales projections were in the low thousands. It sold forty-four thousand in its first year. Read on for the cartoon licensing deal, the horn that cost ten thousand dollars to develop, and the mid-year option package that turned a budget muscle car into a Hemi hunter.
Pontiac built 6,833 GTO Judges for 1969 and only 108 of them were convertibles. This one is believed to be the last Judge convertible built for the model year, wearing a special-order color and carrying the 366-horsepower Ram Air III 400. The Judge started life as John DeLorean’s plan for a cheap, stripped GTO to fight the Road Runner, and then got optioned into something else entirely. Here is how that happened.