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Ford built two completely different 1969 Mustang Mach 1s that looked identical parked side by side, and most buyers had no idea which one they were driving home. Same badge, same stripe, same scooped hood, same displacement on the fender. The difference came down to a single character in the VIN. This Acapulco Blue fastback settles the question the moment its hood comes up, and the answer explains a lot about how Ford sold the Mach 1.
Ford built roughly 15,000 Fox body Mustangs specifically for police work, and almost nobody outside law enforcement knew they existed. Plain notchback bodies, upgraded cooling, reinforced floors and a certified speedometer made them ideal for chasing down interstate traffic. Decades later, drag racers figured out the same recipe works just as well at the strip, and one of them now runs nine-second passes with a naturally aspirated small block.
Pontiac rated the 1973 Super Duty 455 at 290 net horsepower, a figure most experts believe was deliberately conservative by around 85 horsepower. The engine used a reinforced block, four-bolt mains, forged rods and pistons, and a nitrided crankshaft. Only 252 SD-455 Trans Ams were built that year out of 4,802 total, split 72 manual and 180 automatic. Read on to find out how one engineering team built a genuine muscle car in the year everyone else quit.
Fourteen years before muscle cars ruled American roads, Chevrolet was already borrowing parts suppliers from the Corvette line to build a pickup that looked like nothing else on a job site. The Cameo Carrier used fiberglass to hide a stepside bed and invented an entire category in the process. This resto-modded 1957 example carries a modern driveline underneath, and the truck’s real history is more surprising than the smooth flanks suggest.
George Hansen first saw an Oldsmobile Starfire in a neighbor’s driveway as a boy and spent the next fifty years wanting one. The car he eventually found was Oldsmobile’s answer to the personal luxury market, named after a jet fighter and carrying a 394 cubic-inch V8 rated at 345 horsepower. Read on for what made the Starfire unusual, and why the convertible is the harder version to find.
Eighty-five thousand dollars went into turning a 1955 Chevrolet 210 sedan, the middle trim of the Tri-Five range, into a street rod its owner says drives like a modern car. A ZZ4 crate small block under dual four-barrels, a 700R4 overdrive, a square-tube chassis and Camaro rear suspension are only part of the list. Read on for what a 210 buyer actually got in 1955 and how far this build has traveled from it.
Duck X Productions’ Lights Out 7 turned South Georgia Motorsports Park into a proving ground for radial-tire cars pushing well past 2,000 horsepower, and the wheelstands that resulted became the stuff of drag racing legend. From the physics of exactly when a front end lifts to the underdog racer who showed up without a running car and left with a five-figure purse, the story behind the chaos is stranger than the clips alone let on.
This 1967 Pontiac Firebird convertible looks close enough to factory-stock to fool a casual glance — until you learn the restoration shop deliberately built in modern parts to make it run and handle better than it ever did new. Shop owners Chuck and Debbie Woolery walk through exactly what changed and what stayed original on this Pearl White, 400-cubic-inch first-year Firebird, shown at Chicago’s World of Wheels. Watch to see where the line between restoration and improvement actually falls.
The 1974 Plymouth ‘Cuda was the last of the E-bodies, built in a year when the biggest engine on the order form made 245 net horsepower. This one no longer carries what the factory installed: the 360 has been bored and stroked to 408 cubic inches and fitted with three two-barrel carburetors. Read on for what Plymouth actually offered that final year and why builders keep reaching for this combination.
Only 5,718 Riviera Gran Sports were built for 1966, a personal luxury coupe hiding a 425-cubic-inch Nailhead V8 rated at 340 horsepower, with an optional twin-carburetor setup pushing it to 360. Buick marketed the GS around ride and handling rather than what was under the hood. Values have historically trailed flashier muscle cars despite genuinely rare production numbers. Read on to find out why the overlooked Riviera GS may be the best value in sixties Buick performance.
A wheelie wagon and a beat-up Nova lined up for a Wheels Up exhibition run, continuing a tradition that traces back to Bill Golden’s 1965 Little Red Wagon. This piece traces the wheelstander format from its Hemi-powered origins through the Novas that later joined the craze, and explains why the format still draws a crowd more than half a century after it began.
Five American muscle cars, one European showroom: a ’71 ‘Cuda, a ’68 and a ’69 Charger R/T side by side, a ’69 Super Bee, and a ’69 Mustang Mach 1, all curated by a German dealer for a collector market thousands of miles from Detroit. Viewers in the comments wasted no time picking a favorite — and it wasn’t unanimous. Watch the full lineup and decide which of these five actually deserves the title.
Bolting GT badges onto a base Mustang takes ten minutes. Telling a genuine factory GT from a well-executed clone takes a good deal longer, and the tells are not where most buyers look. A VIN digit, a stamped reinforcement plate, a gas cap and a rear valance will settle the argument faster than any emblem. Here is what to check, in what order, before the money changes hands.
Dodge built exactly 503 Charger Daytonas in 1969, the bare minimum NASCAR homologation required, and 433 of them carried the 440 Magnum making 375 horsepower and 480 lb-ft. The 23-inch wing and pointed nose cone existed for aerodynamics, not showrooms, and dealers struggled to sell them. In March 1970 a Daytona became the first car to officially lap a closed course at over 200 mph. Read on to find out how a rulebook produced the strangest shape Detroit ever sold.
The 1971 Plymouth Duster 340 was the cheapest genuine muscle car Mopar sold, hiding a 275-horsepower small block in a body built on the same compact A-body as the economy Valiant. Only 12,886 were built as true 340 cars that year, the lowest production of the run and the last before compression ratios fell. Roughly 1,200 got the one-year-only V24 blackout hood. Read on to find out why the plainest car in the lineup has the best story.