 |
Pro driver Randy Pobst put the 2018 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 1LE through a hot lap at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca as part of Motor Trend’s 2017 Best Driver’s Car competition — a field normally dominated by six-figure exotics. Built with track-tuned suspension and aerodynamics beyond the standard ZL1, the 1LE was Chevrolet’s answer to anyone who doubted a Camaro belonged on the same list as genuine supercars.
Take a genuine 1968 Dodge Coronet, strip off the rear wheels, and bolt on a pair of snowmobile tracks, and you get a machine that shouldn’t work but somehow does. This half-track conversion trades quarter-mile bragging rights for the ability to plow through drifts most trucks wouldn’t attempt, built by a hobbyist working almost entirely from scratch. Half-track conversions have a strange, scattered history in American car culture — finding one wearing a genuine muscle car body is rarer still. Read on to find out what makes this build so unusual.
What began as a modest car show in Rangiora, New Zealand has grown into one of the largest muscle car gatherings in the Southern Hemisphere. Muscle Car Madness draws hot rod and classic car fans from across New Zealand’s South Island and beyond for a full weekend of displays, trade stalls, and V8 noise at the Rangiora Showgrounds. Founder Craig Stare never expected it to last this long. Here’s how a small regional show became a South Island institution.
Ted Stephens owns all five surviving screen-used Dodge Challengers from the 1997 TV remake of Vanishing Point — the only ones left, since every car from the original 1971 film has been destroyed. His favorite of the five, a white 1970 Challenger RT, hides a detail almost no movie car ever gets: a genuine HEMI under the hood instead of a stunt-friendly substitute. It’s a piece of film history most fans don’t even know exists.
Being an early Tesla adopter used to mean turning heads in every parking lot – until everyone else got one too. This piece looks at what tends to happen once the novelty of silent, instant acceleration wears off, and why some owners find themselves drawn right back toward something loud, mechanical, and unmistakably muscle car. Quick and thrilling, it turns out, aren’t always the same thing.
A Model S P100D running Ludicrous mode took on a pulley-swapped, drag-radial-equipped Dodge Hellcat at Atlanta Dragway, and the margin at the stripe came down to hundredths of a second. This piece breaks down what each car actually brought to the line, why reaction time mattered as much as horsepower, and how Dodge’s own SRT Demon was built a year later to answer exactly this kind of race.
The Fast Lane Car set out to verify Dodge’s claim that the 2018 Challenger Demon was the world’s fastest-accelerating production car — and watched it run the quarter mile in 9.65 seconds, bone stock. Getting there required a factory transbrake, adjustable launch control, and a supercharged Hemi V8 pushing well past 800 horsepower. Commenters call it the last true American muscle car for a reason. Watch the full run and hear that supercharger whine for yourself.
While six-figure Demon markups and Hellcat mania grabbed every headline, the Dodge Challenger R/T Scat Pack quietly kept doing nearly everything the halo cars do. This low-mileage example, which has already changed hands once, packs a genuine 485 horsepower from its naturally aspirated 6.4-liter 392 Hemi V8, all for less than 33,000. Read on to see why enthusiasts increasingly call the Scat Pack the smartest buy in the entire modern Challenger lineup.
Dodge’s 2017 Challenger SRT Hellcat hid a 707-horsepower supercharged HEMI under an ordinary-looking body, backed by a 650 lb-ft torque figure, a 199 mph top speed, and a 3.5-second sprint to 60. It even shipped with two different keys that changed how much power the car was willing to give you. Read on for the numbers, the rivals it outran, and what clean examples are worth on today’s collector market.
A stray comment in retired fireman Garrett Moore’s man cave sent Pete Rudometkin slogging through the worst rains Northern California had seen in thirty years, chasing a 1970 Mustang fastback abandoned on a ranch between Petaluma and Rohnert Park. What he found was an R-code 428 Ram Air Cobra Jet Mach 1 — and buried in its build sheet, the W-code that made it genuinely rare. Read on for what that code means and why it changes everything.
A top-of-the-line 1974 Dodge Charger SE with a 440 under the hood and a set of quarter windows unlike anything else on the lot — Victoria Friday’s ride sits at the crossroads of the Charger’s Bullitt-era fame and Detroit’s mid-1970s retreat from raw horsepower. Read on to see what actually separated the SE from an ordinary Charger, and why the 440 badge still mattered in a year emissions rules were choking performance everywhere else.
The Logan City PCYC car show marked its tenth anniversary with a promise from organizer Marika Saliba to make it the biggest edition yet. Past shows have drawn more than 500 muscle cars to the grounds south of Brisbane, all part of a community fundraiser built entirely around a shared love of V8 power. Here’s what a decade of grassroots car culture looks like when it’s done right.
A genuine 426 Hemi Road Runner, one of only 152 built in 1970, lines up against a 1972 Oldsmobile 442 W-30, one of just 772 built that year, in a quarter-mile grudge match that splits the difference between torque and top end. The W-30’s blueprinted 455 gets off the line first, but the Hemi’s legendary top-end pull closes the gap by the traps. Viewers have been arguing in the comments ever since about which car actually deserved the win. Watch the run and decide for yourself which factory got it right.
A Tesla P100D in Ludicrous mode has genuinely beaten a stock Dodge Hellcat off the line thanks to instant electric torque, but bolt drag radials and a smaller pulley onto the Hemi and the fight tightens into a genuinely confusing result depending on how you define winning. Dodge answered with the Demon and Demon 170 partly because of exactly this kind of matchup. Read on to find out what a 707-horsepower supercharged V8 versus instant torque actually proves.
Ford’s 1964 Mustang launch caught Chevrolet flat-footed, and the two-year scramble to build the Camaro set off a rivalry that’s run through Trans-Am road courses, COPO-built drag strip specials, a near-death in the malaise era, and matching retro revivals. With Camaro production paused since 2024, the fight looks different than it has in sixty years — but grassroots tracks, cruise nights, and the collector market show it’s far from settled.