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Dodge and the Fast and Furious franchise have been tied together since Dominic Toretto first tore the wheels off his father’s 1970 Charger. By The Fate of the Furious, that relationship had grown into a full co-branded campaign called Muscle Heaven, built around a fleet of silver-and-black Challenger SRT Demons. The timing was not accidental. Read on to find out what Dodge was actually proving with it.
Genuine 1970 Plymouth Superbirds are nearly impossible to find and even harder to afford, so this build started from a Plymouth Satellite instead and became a hand-crafted tribute complete with the aero car’s iconic nose cone and towering rear wing. Featured on Muscle Car of the Week, it lives in The Brothers Collection alongside vintage NASCAR racers and bone-stock originals. Watch to see how close a tribute build can get to the real thing.
This feature follows a two-year-long 1967 Chevy C10 build, inching toward completion while its owner watched his girlfriend’s 1941 Willys pickup rack up show trophies. The C10’s blend of clean 1967-72 styling and modern LS-engine power has made it one of the most popular restomod platforms on the market. The question of just how powerful this particular truck turned out to be remains part of its appeal.
Jay Leno almost passed on his now-famous McLaren F1 twice, calling the roughly $800,000 asking price ‘crazy’ before coming back two weeks later and buying it anyway. That car is worth north of $20 million today, and Leno has turned down offers to sell it — proof, he says, that buying a classic because you love it beats buying one purely as an investment. It’s advice that applies whether you’re shopping for a hypercar or a muscle car.
Chrysler built so few Hemi powered E-body convertibles that commonly cited production figures put the entire two-year total at roughly two dozen cars worldwide. Bob Ashton spent nearly a full year on the phone with Mopar collectors trying to get 27 of them into one room at the Muscle Car And Corvette Nationals in Rosemont, Illinois. Read on for why that gathering may never be repeated, and what makes these particular cars so nearly impossible to assemble.
The Streetkhana autocross has become a fixture of the NSRA Street Rod Nationals, turning a corner of the Kentucky Exposition Center into a timed slalom course for hot rods built decades before autocross existed. Introduced in 2016, the format tests driver skill with hairpins, switchbacks, and speed-gathering straights, awarding fastest pre-1949 and post-1949 cars. What began as an experiment has become an annual tradition.
A Texas tuning shop put a bone-stock 2017 Camaro ZL1 and its brand-new 10-speed automatic through a real 0-180 mph pull, and the data logger caught it still upshifting at the top end. Viewers argued over everything from the fuel gauge to a short-shifted launch. Hennessey teased something far more extreme was coming next. Watch the full run to see it.
A grandfather who sold used cars for 60 years, a mom who beat the neighborhood Corvette owner in a full-size Pontiac, and a dad who won a drag race at 69 — this is a family where muscle cars run three generations deep. From a Mach 1 Mustang to a Dodge Super Bee to a 2016 Mustang GT painted in a nod to Steve McQueen’s Bullitt car, the cars change but the obsession never has.
From a free Detroit cruise that draws over a million spectators to a hot rod club that grew from one parking-lot show into 15 events nationwide, Americas classic car calendar has options for every kind of muscle car fan. Vintage racers get their own weekend at Laguna Seca, while parts hunters have the Pomona Swap Meet nearly year-round. Here is where the real action happens beyond the show-and-shine circuit.
The Hennessey Venom GT hit 270.49 mph at NASA’s old Space Shuttle runway in February 2014, a speed that should make it the fastest production car ever built. It isn’t official: Guinness requires at least 30 units to qualify, and Hennessey never got there — accounts of the final tally range from 13 to 29 units, but every version falls short, so the record technically doesn’t count despite the number being real. At 2,743 pounds and roughly 1 horsepower per kilogram, it’s easy to see how the numbers got there in the first place.
Dodge never built a Challenger convertible on the assembly line, and for most of the Hellcat’s life the only way to get one involved shipping a brand-new car to a specialty shop in Florida and waiting. The Plum Crazy example that made the rounds started exactly that way. Years later Dodge made the arrangement official, quoting the conversion at $25,999 and routing cars straight from the factory to the shop. Read on to find out how a roofless 707-horsepower Challenger became a semi-official product.
Shelby American’s answer to the F-150 was not a lift kit and a set of tires. It was a Whipple supercharger on the 5.0-liter Coyote V8, 750 horsepower, a lowered chassis, and a price approaching six figures — three hundred horsepower more than the Raptor Ford was building at the same time, and only 150 of them for the model year. Read on to find out what Shelby actually changed, and why a street truck rather than a desert runner was the point.
Fifty-seven horsepower separated the sixth-generation Camaro ZL1 from the Challenger SRT Hellcat, and the Dodge held the bigger number. Hennessey Performance lined them up anyway, and the horsepower column turned out to be the least interesting part of the comparison — because weight, gearing, tire width, and what happens in the first sixty feet decide a drag race long before either car reaches top gear. Read on to find out why 650 horsepower and 707 horsepower end up much closer than the spec sheets suggest.
Dodge builds an all-wheel-drive Challenger, but the only engine you can get with it is a V6 — so EddieX asks the obvious, slightly provocative question: does that still count as a muscle car? The answer that comes back from actual GT owners in the snowbelt has almost nothing to do with horsepower, and everything to do with why they bought this exact car in the first place. What does “muscle car” even mean once winter tires enter the conversation?
Engineering Explained’s Jason Fenske breaks down what a hemispherical combustion chamber actually is — the dome-shaped design behind Chrysler’s legendary 426 Hemi, and the reason the name became shorthand for raw American power. The real story involves valve geometry, spark plug placement, and a genuine engineering tradeoff most casual fans never learn about. Watch to see why modern Hemi-badged engines aren’t quite what the original name promised.