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The Corvette Grand Sport has more horsepower, a lower price, and won the braking and handling tests — yet the turbocharged Porsche 911 Carrera S still gets to 60 mph quicker. The spec sheet and the stopwatch tell two different stories, and which one matters most depends entirely on how the car actually gets driven.
Ford built the Boss 302 for exactly one reason, and it had nothing to do with street driving. Handing that same high-revving, solid-lifter engine to a Mercury Cougar looks almost like an afterthought, yet that is what happened once the Eliminator package took over as Mercury’s performance flagship. Only 469 Cougars were built with it. This Competition Gold example is documented as a one-of-one. Read on for how a country-club coupe ended up with a race engine.
Mercury built the Cougar to sell refinement, with hidden headlights, a plusher cabin and advertising built around sophistication rather than stripes. Then Ford handed it the 428 Cobra Jet and refinement stopped being the point. Order sheets show fewer than 130 Ram Air Cobra Jet Cougars left the line that year in any body style, and convertibles built to this specification were rarer still. Read on for how a country-club car became one of the era’s hardest finds.
This fastback Mustang hides a small-block engine that started life chasing wins at Indianapolis, not stoplight bragging rights — the all-aluminum, DOHC Ford Indy V8 that powered three straight Indy 500 victories in the mid-1960s, starting with Jim Clark’s Lotus-Ford in 1965. Builders reworked the motor with milder cams and modern fuel injection to make it survive daily street use. What’s left is closer to a race car wearing a Mustang body than a modified pony car.
Slide behind the wheel of a 1968 Firebird 400 expecting nothing but brute force and the first surprise is how composed it feels at speed. Pontiac had spent a year learning what its pony car needed, and the 1968 answer involved a hidden factory restriction, a mid-year engine change and a rear suspension redesign that finally cured the axle tramp. Read on for what actually made this one of the best-sorted pony cars of its year.
At the 2017 World of Wheels show in Rosemont, Illinois, Lou Costabile finds a Lightning Blue Roush Stage 3 Mustang that isn’t owned by a collector at all — it’s a rolling partnership between Roush Performance and Meguiar’s Car Care Products. Driver Spike Anderson explains exactly how that arrangement works and why this six-speed, supercharged Mustang exists in the first place. The story behind the car turns out to be as interesting as the car itself.
The 1963 Corvette Sting Ray was a complete reinvention — new chassis, independent rear suspension, hidden headlights, and a split rear window that lasted exactly one model year. Put one in the hands of Alloway’s Hot Rod Shop, a place known nationally for black paint and a stance that looks like it is trying to get under the pavement, and the result is a specific kind of collision between two design philosophies. Read on to find out what makes that combination work.
Nobody at this drag event could identify the mystery vehicle drawing a crowd – until 1320video tracked down the owner and got the hood open. It turns out to be a Local Motors Rally Fighter, essentially a sand rail in body panels, hiding a supercharged LS3 V8. Watch to see it make a pass nobody expected.
Nothing about this Corvette’s original build sheet matches what is under its hood today. The factory small-block has given way to a 383 stroker with an upgraded transmission, suspension and cooling system, wearing dark blue metallic paint over a restored leather interior. The stock 1981 engine made 190 horsepower. This one claims 500. Read on for how that gap got closed, and why 1981 was one of the strangest years in Corvette history.
By 1973 the American luxury convertible market had narrowed to exactly one survivor, and the Cadillac Eldorado was it. Lincoln had walked away in 1967 and Chrysler’s Imperial followed a year later, leaving Cadillac alone with a 500-cubic-inch V8, front-wheel drive and no competition to undercut it. Then one of them paced the Indianapolis 500. Read on for what it was really like to own the last of a dying breed.
A 1969 Dodge Charger gets a modern supercharged Hellcat V8 transplant in this build, appropriately named ‘Reverence,’ from the specialists at Cleveland Power & Performance. The test drive captures how a decades-old muscle car icon behaves with more than 700 horsepower now sitting under the hood. Watch to hear exactly what a Hellcat swap sounds like packed into a classic Charger this size.
The 409 might be the only engine in American history sold as much by a pop song as by a marketing department. Chevrolet moved 142 of them in 1961 and more than fifteen thousand the following year, and a Beach Boys B-side released that same summer had a great deal to do with the difference. This black 1962 Impala SS wears the nickname Black Diamond and a 409 under the hood. Read on to find out which version of that engine actually mattered.
An 84mm turbo and an LS swap under a Mustang’s hood usually means one thing: a car built to run eight-second quarter miles and leave the front wheels off the ground doing it. Builds like this lean on the LS platform’s strength and aftermarket support to handle boost levels a stock Ford small-block was never designed for. The result is as much a test of chassis engineering as raw horsepower.
The 1970 Boss 302 exists for one reason: Ford needed to beat the Camaro Z/28 in Trans-Am racing, and the rules said it had to sell street versions to do it. The engine that resulted borrowed cylinder head technology from an entirely different Ford engine family to solve a breathing problem, and production more than quadrupled between the first and second model years. Read on to find out what changed, and why the 1970 car is the one enthusiasts chase.
A 1965 Ford Galaxie 500 XL convertible with the R-code 427 was one of the strangest performance cars Ford ever sold: a two-ton, four-seat drop-top carrying a dual-quad big block that the factory refused to pair with an automatic transmission. Checking that single order-sheet letter changed the suspension, the driveshaft, and the brakes before the car ever reached a dealer. Read on to find out why so few of these survived the decade they were built in.