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Pontiac released the first Trans Am in March 1969 as a barely advertised option package, using a name it had to license from the SCCA because it did not own it. Total first-year production came to just 697 cars: 689 coupes and 8 convertibles, every single one finished in Cameo White with Tyrol Blue stripes. Of those, 520 were Ram Air III four-speed coupes like this one. Read on for how a rushed, quiet launch became one of the most famous nameplates in American car history.
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.
Drag Week is built to break cars: five days, multiple drag strips, and hundreds of miles of public roads in between. One driver’s twin-turbocharged 1966 Chevy II Nova didn’t just survive the format — it won five years running, and became the first car in the event’s history to post both a six-second pass and a 200 mph run. Here’s how an all-steel, 3,500-pound Nova became the benchmark for what a real street car can do.
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.
Chevrolet built 243,085 Camaros for 1969, and the model year ran roughly five months longer than it should have because the second-generation car was not ready. Hidden in the order books from that unusually long run are two Central Office Production Order codes most dealers never mentioned, one of which paired the car with a 425-horsepower 427. Read on for what Chevrolet was quietly building behind those numbers, and why the ’69 is still the first-gen everyone wants.
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.
Somewhere in the Mopar world sits a small handful of 1970 Dodge Challenger R/Ts that even seasoned Hemi historians rarely get to see in person, built around a fiberglass hood borrowed from a racetrack homologation special. Few buyers understood what they were ordering, and the option vanished from build sheets almost as fast as it appeared. Read on to find out just how rare this Hemi and N94 hood combination really was.
Out of nearly 50,000 Dodge Chargers built for 1970, barely one in five carried the R/T badge, and of those, only a fraction were ordered with a four-speed manual instead of the far more common automatic. The 440 Magnum was not even the top engine option that year, yet it remains one of the most beloved big-block Mopars of the era. Read on to find out just how rare this combination really was.
A 1966 Chevrolet Bel Air was never meant to be anything more than dependable, affordable transportation, Chevrolet’s plain-Jane offering that sat below the flashier Impala. Somewhere along the way, one particular example ended up wearing a rear-mounted turbo setup chasing four-digit horsepower numbers nobody in Detroit could have imagined in 1966. Read on to find out what it takes to turn a sensible family sedan into a four-digit-horsepower monster.