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Behind the muscle cars rolling through the South East Moparty Picnic is a Hollywood footnote almost nobody knows — the 1971 Hemi ‘Cuda convertible Don Johnson drove in Nash Bridges wasn’t really a ’71 at all, because Plymouth only ever built eleven or twelve of the real thing. Here’s how three modified 1970 convertibles became one of TV’s most famous muscle cars, and why Mopar loyalists still argue about it today.
For the Camaro’s 50th anniversary, Chevrolet didn’t settle for a badge and a paint stripe. The sixth-generation car arrived smaller, sharper-handling, and backed by a lineup running from a 275-horsepower turbo-four up to a 455-horsepower SS V8, with a new ZL1 added specifically for the occasion. Here’s what made the anniversary edition — and the platform underneath it — genuinely worth the celebration.
Ford gave the Mustang II one final send-off in 1978, borrowing styling straight from its biggest rival to create the rarest trim of the whole generation. The King Cobra combined Trans Am-inspired graphics with a genuine 302 V8, a factory air dam unique to the model, and a fully-equipped price that pushed past $6,000. Read on to find out how one six-Mustang-II collector still had to go hunting for the one trim missing from his garage.
Muscle At The Strip, formerly Mopars At The Strip, brought the Mopar Muscle Scat Pack Challenge and Hellcat Shootout to The Strip At Las Vegas on April 21 through 23, 2017, splitting the field between 392 Apache Hemi cars and 707-horsepower supercharged Hellcats. Both brackets went to manual-transmission cars, an upset in classes the eight-speed automatics usually dominate. Read on to find out how the stick shifts pulled it off.
Las Vegas is not just one of the best cities for classic car enthusiasts by reputation – it is backed up by real numbers, hosting the SEMA Show’s roughly 160,000 attendees and 2,200 exhibitors every year since 1977. Combined with St. Louis, Sacramento, and Miami’s own car cultures, this list reveals what really makes a city a haven for enthusiasts: infrastructure, climate, and a packed events calendar.
Chevelle enthusiasts had swapped rumors for years about a 1970 SS454 sitting untouched inside a collapsed Ohio barn. In May 2017, a grainy cell phone video finally proved the story true — and when the car came out after nearly 40 years, its original buildsheet was still tucked inside the door panel. Read on to find out what that buildsheet revealed about how, and why, this particular Chevelle was built.
David Cach’s TorRed 2015 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat beat out a field of nominees to win Hellcat of the Month on the SRT Hellcat Facebook page, no small feat among a community full of 707-horsepower Challengers. Behind that community vote sits genuine engineering history, the first factory-supercharged HEMI Dodge ever built. Read on to find out what actually made the Hellcat program possible.
Roadster Shop took a 1967 Chevelle that looks period-correct from fifteen feet away and hid a 680-horsepower supercharged LS, a custom Fast Track chassis, and a six-speed manual underneath it. The build keeps its original-style interior and chrome trim intact, proving a genuine pro touring monster does not have to look like one. Read on to find out what’s really under that Onyx Black paint.
Rick Hendrick, a NASCAR team owner famous for collecting VIN 001 of practically every major GM performance car, won the very first customer-spec Camaro ZL1 1LE at a Barrett-Jackson charity auction in Palm Beach. His $250,000 bid went entirely to the United Way rather than to Chevrolet. Read on to find out what made this particular ZL1 1LE the fastest production Camaro Chevrolet had built to that point.
This burgundy 1976 Ford Torino made local headlines after being stolen from a driveway, but the real story is what it represents: the final model year Ford ever built a car under the Torino name before renaming the whole lineup LTD II for 1977. Only 193,096 were built that year. Here is what made the Torino’s last stand worth remembering.
Getting real drag wheels onto a modern Camaro, Mustang, or Challenger is nothing like bolting slicks onto a classic Chevelle, and that fitment gap is what Race Star Wheels built its business around. From a single design launched in 2009 to Friction Stir Fusion welding and a partnership with Pro Stock stars Greg Anderson and Jason Line, here is how one wheel company earned its place on serious drag cars, and what that means for the weekend racer.
The Dodge Challenger Hellcat’s supercharged 707-horsepower engine turned nearly every drag strip in the country into an unofficial record chase. Racers like Jason Epling and the HHP-built TopCat pushed the factory-based combination into the 7-second and then 8-second range within a couple of years of its 2015 launch. Read on to find out just how far the same basic engine architecture eventually went.
When Fiat Chrysler finally attached a price tag to the Durango SRT, the 475-horsepower, 12.9-second-quarter-mile three-row SUV suddenly looked less like an expensive halo vehicle and more like a genuine bargain. Executive Tim Kuniskis called it America’s fastest SUV, and the numbers backed up the claim in ways few family haulers had ever matched. Read on to find out exactly what the sticker included, and how Dodge justified putting Hellcat-adjacent performance into a school-run vehicle.
Dodge’s Demon shipped on genuine drag radial tires straight from the factory, a first for any production street car, but those tires were too wide for the main assembly line to handle. Read on to find out how Dodge solved a manufacturing problem nobody had ever faced before, and why owning one comes with a strange winter-storage rule.