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Only about 619 of them were ever built, and the racing driver they were named after had left the brand before the model year was over. The 1968 Mercury Cougar XR7-G began as a tribute to Dan Gurney’s Trans-Am program and ended as a one-year-only special with no factory racing effort left to celebrate. What buyers actually got for their money is stranger than the story behind it. Read on to find out what made this Cougar different.
A 1972 Chevrolet C10 left the factory with an engine that would struggle to merge onto a modern freeway. This one wears Satin Orange paint, 20-inch black chrome wheels, a custom interior, and an LS1 where the tired original small block used to sit. That swap has become so common in the classic truck world that an entire industry exists to support it. Read on to find out why the LS became the default answer and what the 1972 model year means to collectors.
Pontiac named its most famous option package after a punchline from a late-sixties sketch comedy show, and it worked well enough that the name outlived the company. Line a 1969 GTO Judge with the 366-horsepower Ram Air III against a custom 2006 GTO running a twin-turbo LS2 at roughly 750 horsepower and you have two cars wearing the same badge and chasing the same reputation by completely opposite methods. Read on to find out which approach actually holds up.
Dropping a 440-cubic-inch big block into a Barracuda meant giving up power steering and power brakes entirely, because there was simply nowhere left to put them. Plymouth did it anyway, and the result was one of the most single-minded muscle cars Detroit ever sold. Here is why the engine barely fit, how few were actually built, what the weight distribution did to the way it drives, and why a well-sorted 440 Cuda still stops a car show cold.
A full-size four-door family Ford that could humiliate a pony car at a stoplight sounds like a contradiction until you find the fine print on a 1965 Galaxie 500 order form. One option code brought two four-barrel Holley carburetors, a solid-lifter camshaft, and compression north of ten to one, all behind a grille identical to every other Galaxie on the lot. Almost nobody checked that box. Read on to find out what Ford was hiding and why so few buyers ever asked.
Shelby American built only a handful of genuine GT350 convertibles in 1966, and they were never meant for the public at all. That scarcity is what makes a carefully assembled tribute car so compelling: start with a real 23,000-mile C-code Mustang convertible, add every genuine Shelby Hi-Po component available, and chase a car that almost nobody alive has ever seen in person. Read on to find out what separates the real four from everything built since.
Ferrari built just 36 examples of the 250 GTO, and the vast majority have spent the decades since locked in private collections rather than being driven hard on a mountain road. That is what makes footage of one actually working so unusual. Here is what is under the bodywork, why the racing record still matters, how the car became the most valuable automobile in the world, and why hearing one at full throttle tells you things no spec sheet can.
V8TV steps outside its usual 1960s and 70s territory for episode 206, profiling a 2011 Nickey Performance Stage III S 427 Camaro from The Brothers Collection. Nickey isn’t a modern marketing invention; it’s a real Chicago dealership that built factory-adjacent big-block Camaros back in the 1960s, and this build carries that name forward with four-digit horsepower you don’t need a racetrack to use. One commenter admits it’s the modern muscle car that finally got an old-school purist thinking. Watch to see why.
V8TV’s Muscle Car Of The Week pulls a 2016 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat from The Brothers Collection, shot with only 35 miles on the odometer. Viewers can’t stop talking about the supercharged whine, with one owner admitting he still smiles every time he starts his up months later. The comments turn into a running debate over Hellcat versus Camaro, versus a 392 Scat Pack Shaker manual, and even a look ahead to the Demon that hadn’t arrived yet. Watch to hear what 707 horsepower actually sounds like from the outside.
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.