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A twenty-year hunt, a $50 factory option box, and a Pennsylvania barn find that finally ended the search – this 1977 Pontiac Trans Am W72 four-speed proves the right muscle car is worth waiting decades for. Pontiac squeezed real horsepower out of a 400-cubic-inch V8 during the darkest years of the emissions era, and paired with a four-speed stick, it became one of the rarest combinations to leave a Pontiac showroom.
The story of the first-ever Mustang gets stranger the deeper you look, sold to an airline pilot three days before launch, and built weeks before Ford was even ready to show the car publicly. Here is what happened when Ford spent two years trying to get their own prototype back, and what it finally took to convince the pilot to give it up.
Rain kept the crowds a little smaller at the fourth annual Street Machine & Muscle Car Nationals, but it didn’t stop a wild mix of gassers, lead sleds, and Pro Street builds from filling the Fairplex in Pomona. A supercharged 1929 Dodge Brothers coupe running a 452-cubic-inch Hemi shares space with a Batmobile-liveried Camaro and a smoking Oldsmobile 442 burnout. See which build stands out from a packed Southern California show season.
A pair of drain holes near the exhaust tips had GT350 owners convinced Ford had cut a corner – until the real explanation surfaced: they’re a deliberate piece of an engine built to survive an 8,250 rpm redline on track. The Voodoo 5.2-liter V8’s flat-plane crankshaft is unlike anything else Ford has bolted into a Mustang, and keeping it alive under sustained abuse took more than just horsepower.
HOT ROD Power Tour has been rolling across America since 1995, when it started as an eight-day dare from a museum parking lot in LA to a fairground in Ohio. By 2017 it had grown into the country’s biggest moving car show, and the cars that stole the spotlight in Kansas City and Iowa weren’t the newest builds. They were the ’70s survivors that almost didn’t make it past the smog era.
The fifth-generation Buick Regal GS drops nearly 300 pounds and adds a torque-vectoring twin-clutch rear axle few sedans in its class can match. A 310-horsepower V6 and nine-speed automatic back up the chassis work, while dedicated Sport and GS modes retune everything from steering effort to shift timing. Buick’s global boss even drew a direct line back to the Riviera GS when introducing it. Here’s what actually changed under the skin.
Ask ten muscle car owners whether it is safe to skip gears in a manual transmission and you will get ten confident, contradictory answers. Engineering Explained breaks down the real mechanics behind rev-matching, synchronizer wear, and why classic four-speed boxes like the Muncie and Borg-Warner are especially unforgiving of sloppy shifts. The science settles an argument that has been running at cruise nights for decades. Watch to find out which side was actually right.
A supercharged 707-horsepower Hemi V8 was never built with snow in mind, which is exactly why watching a Dodge Charger Hellcat fight for traction in a snow-covered parking lot is so much fun. Dodge backs that number with 650 lb-ft of torque and a 3.6-second run to 60 mph — numbers that make winter driving feel like an entirely different kind of stunt. Some cars are built for the drag strip. This one apparently doesn’t take winter off.
Chevy’s 1LE package comes in two flavors, a 335-horsepower V-6 and a 455-horsepower V-8, and both get the same Brembo brakes, Magnetic Ride Control, and electronic limited-slip differential that make this one of the best track-day bargains Chevrolet has ever built. Here is why the “budget” V-6 version might actually be the smarter buy for a lot of drivers.
A pair of veteran car show judges pulled back the curtain on what actually earns points on the show field – and it’s rarely the stuff that catches a casual walker-by’s eye. From factory-correct parts and materials to inspections of the engine bay, trunk, and undercarriage, judging a classic car is a far more forensic process than most owners realize. Here’s their advice on where to actually focus your restoration.
Every December, the biggest names in no-prep racing save their reveals for the Performance Racing Industry trade show in Indianapolis, and this year it was The Reaper’s turn. Street Outlaws fans know exactly what that name carries on the no-prep circuit, and the new Procharged Camaro unveiled at PRI raised expectations before it ever made a single pass. What does a switch to forced induction mean for the season ahead? Watch the reveal and see for yourself.
Yenko’s name has not meant much on a new car in decades, but a modern stroker build on the Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport just brought it roaring back. With a supercharged 6.8-liter making roughly 800 horsepower, wrapped in Grand Sport hardware and genuine Yenko styling cues, only fifty of these were ever built. Here’s what’s actually under the skin.
This widebody Mustang notchback is a design pitch from Chris Cyrulewski, not a finished car — he’d completed the render and was seeking investors to build it. Whether or not it ever leaves the digital stage, concepts like this keep shaping what real owners build in the Fox-body and notchback aftermarket scene.
The Camaro was born as Chevy’s rushed answer to the Ford Mustang, rolling off the line months ahead of schedule just to compete. Fifty years, six generations, and more than five million cars later, it has become an American institution in its own right. Here’s how Chevrolet marked the milestone, and how a car built to catch up ended up setting the pace.