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A custom shop barely a year and a half old rolled four vehicles onto the SEMA 2016 floor, including a Plymouth ‘Cuda wearing a full carbon-fiber body built from parts customers could actually buy. That wasn’t the only rule getting rewritten that year — Dodge introduced the first all-wheel-drive American muscle car, and one shop found a way to add twin turbochargers on top of an already-supercharged Hellcat engine. Read on to find out how far builders were willing to push the muscle car formula.
Every muscle car owner has heard the paint-shop horror stories – cars disappearing for months or years without progress. Muscle Car Review’s April 2017 issue sat down with three respected restoration pros, Bob Perkins, Jason White, and Ken Maisano, to get real advice on hiring a painter and working with a shop. Their tips are aimed squarely at helping readers avoid becoming the next horror story. Here’s what they had to say.
Picking nine cars worth talking about out of an auto show floor crammed with hundreds means making hard editorial calls, and The Verge’s walkthrough of the 2018 New York International Auto Show does exactly that, supercars parked next to daily drivers, all narrowed down to a list viewers are still debating. Some picks are the obvious ones. At least one clearly wasn’t. See which vehicles made the cut and how well those calls have aged.
This 1966 Chevy II Nova left the factory rated for a fraction of the horsepower it claims today, after a build that replaced nearly everything Chevrolet originally installed. Getting to over 870 horsepower required a completely different engine, a reinforced chassis, and drivetrain components built to survive power levels the factory unibody was never designed to handle. Read on for what it actually takes to get a compact 1960s Chevy into that territory.
Roland Cassidy assumed the pitch was too good to be true: a numbers-matching 426 Hemi Superbird with 10,000 original miles, one owner, and a complete paper trail back to a Maine dealership in 1971. It had been sitting untouched in a Massachusetts barn since 1990. Read on to find out what he had to throw in to close the deal.
The term “pony car” has nothing to do with horsepower, it describes a specific formula the 1964½ Ford Mustang invented and every Detroit rival scrambled to copy. Fifty years later, the Mustang’s 2015 redesign broke from that formula for the first time, adding independent rear suspension and a turbocharged four-cylinder. Read on to find out what actually separates a pony car from a muscle car.
Plymouth built just eleven 1971 Barracuda convertibles with the 426 Hemi engine, and only seven of them went to U.S. buyers new. That scarcity has pushed sale prices as high as $3.5 million at auction, with a different example chasing a $4.8 million bid in 2021. Read on to find out what separates a seven-figure Hemi ‘Cuda from an ordinary E-body.
Ford revived the Boss 302 name for just two model years, 2012 and 2013, building a Mustang with a carbon-fiber-plate limited-slip differential, shock absorbers adjustable with a flathead screwdriver, and an aero package borrowed directly from the Boss 302R race car. The rarer Laguna Seca edition added Recaro seats and its own suspension tuning. Read on to find out what separates the two model years at a glance.
This 1967 Chevelle skips a factory-correct restoration in favor of an old-school street machine build, complete with a big-block or LS swap, reinforced suspension, and deep-dish wheels. The choices made under the hood and underneath the body reveal a builder chasing a specific look and driving feel rather than numbers-matching authenticity. Read on for what actually separates a good street machine build from a great one.
WeBe Autos walks through a sprawling Pennsylvania inventory of classic and muscle-era cars, from a $250 parts-only 1966 Mustang to a $16,000 1958 Ford retractable hardtop. Between the price tags sits a real lesson in what makes a barn find worth chasing versus worth parting out, and how dealers who specialize in scattered private collections actually price decades of outdoor storage. Watch to see what survives, what doesn’t, and what it’s all actually worth.
A 1969 428 Cobra Jet Mustang Mach 1 sat untouched in a basement for 28 years, emerging with just 41,525 original miles, its factory tires still in the trunk, and a sealed bag of unused headlight adapters Tommy Higgins has already turned down $2,500 for. Documentation includes the original bill of sale, build sheet, and a confirming Marti Report. Read on to find out what else survived nearly three decades of dust.
Hagerty’s 2017 list of the best classic cars to buy leaned hard on 1980s models, and even early-2000s cars, as smart future investments, a call backed by real appreciation data rather than nostalgia. The same year, a $70 million Australian museum opened, the History Channel greenlit a series on a 57-year-old car museum, and a 650-horsepower Camaro ZL1 squared off against a Hellcat. Read on to find out what all of it says about where classic car values were headed.
When the 2018 Camaro ZL1 1LE lapped the Nürburgring’s Nordschleife in 7:16.04, over 13 seconds quicker than the standard automatic ZL1, it wasn’t the whole story. Seven of the ten quickest American cars ever to tackle that track wear a GM badge, and the reasons why say a lot about how seriously Chevy started taking the world’s toughest test.
Robert Lamb’s Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat just became the first of its kind to run a 9-second quarter mile on pump gas — no race fuel, no built engine, just a smart bolt-on parts list and a dialed-in tune. His 9.993-second pass at 137.89 mph came from a car he drives every day, not a dedicated race build. Read on to find out exactly what it took to break a barrier Hellcat owners have been chasing for years.
This 1970 Ford Mustang Mach 1 looks stock from every angle until you notice its engine bay is empty, because the drivetrain has been relocated behind the driver entirely. The build borrows its ambition from Ford’s own mid-engine GT supercar and applies it to a car never designed for the layout. Read on to find out what it took to make a Cleveland-powered classic work as a mid-engine machine.