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When Dodge introduced the all-wheel-drive Challenger GT for 2017, it left the Hemi off the order sheet entirely and got hammered for it. The real reason had less to do with engineering ambition than with certification costs, packaging, and an experiment Dodge had already run on the four-door Charger. Here is what the car actually offered, how its front-axle disconnect worked, and why the V6 suits the chassis better than most people assumed.
When Vic Edelbrock Jr. lost his father in 1962, he inherited a ten-employee garage business and no roadmap for keeping it alive. Instead, the 26-year-old spent the next five decades turning Edelbrock into a -million-a-year name synonymous with American hot-rodding, while helping organize the entire performance parts industry through his years leading SEMA. His story is a reminder that some of the biggest names in muscle car culture started as reluctant successors, not industry veterans.
Seven years into a Barracuda build, this owner realized the most dangerous component in the car was not the supercharged 360 under the hood — it was the fifty-year-old wiring harness feeding it. Original insulation cracks, connectors corrode, and grounds fail in ways that stay invisible until something starts smoking. Rewiring is the least glamorous upgrade on any build sheet and the one that matters most. Read on to find out how it’s actually done.
A Plum Crazy Challenger Hellcat with a folded front end and barely 9,000 miles on the odometer looks like pure waste. It is not. Wrecked Hellcats are routinely parted rather than crushed, because the supercharged engine, transmission, and driveline are worth more separated than the shell is worth whole. The paint code, oddly, is the part that will be hardest to replace. Here is what happens to a car like this next.
One of the actual Dodge Chargers used on screen by Dominic Toretto in the original Fast and the Furious now belongs to an Italian collector — and in 2015, he did something most owners of movie-used muscle cars never risk. He ran it down a real quarter-mile at Rivanazzano’s dragstrip in Italy. The pass has racked up nearly six million views since, mostly from people who can’t believe he actually did it.
Some of the most aerodynamically efficient cars ever built look nothing alike, from the bubble-shaped Volkswagen XL1 to the deceptively ordinary Mercedes-Benz EQS. This rundown breaks down what a drag coefficient actually measures and which production vehicles have posted the lowest numbers on record. The results reshuffle a lot of assumptions about which cars are actually cutting through the air the most efficiently.
In 1987, a hand-built car with no factory badge beat Ferrari, Porsche, and Lamborghini to become the fastest production car in the world. Built in a small German garage by tuner Alois Ruf, the twin-turbo Ruf CTR reached 211 mph and earned the nickname ‘Yellowbird’ after a hair-raising magazine test made it an instant icon. Its record didn’t last forever, but the story behind the car that beat the giants at their own game is one most muscle car fans have never heard in full.
A British Columbia collector spent forty years quietly amassing more than 340 vintage and muscle cars across five acres of land, from a screen-used DeLorean to a rare 1966 Pontiac Beaumont SD. Now ready to let it all go, the owner will only sell it as one package deal, house and restoration shop included, for roughly Can$1.45 million, leaving one big question: who has the space, and the nerve, to take it all on at once?
A 1969 Camaro making close to a thousand horsepower would normally be the headline, but on this build the supercharged 416 small-block is almost the least interesting part. Hand-laid carbon bodywork, machined billet hardware, a completely re-engineered chassis, and a six-speed manual describe a car meant to be driven hard rather than trailered. Here is what went into it, and why builds at this level change what the rest of the market can buy.
Michelle Bongiovanni’s classmates at Penn State did not believe her, and it is hard to blame them. She spends weekends running eight-second quarter miles in a Mustang that Ford builds specifically so it cannot be registered for the road. The Cobra Jet is one of the strangest things a manufacturer sells: a factory-built drag car with no VIN for street use and no pretense of being anything else. Read on to find out how a Mustang ends up like this.
On paper the fifth-generation Camaro ZL1 has no business hanging with a Challenger SRT Hellcat down a quarter mile. The Hellcat brings 707 horsepower to a fight the ZL1 enters with 580, and the trap speeds tell the same story. But drag racing punishes anyone who trusts a spec sheet, and this particular pairing produced a result Mopar fans did not enjoy. Read on to find out where the horsepower advantage actually goes.
Held every May on the Indiana State Fairgrounds the week before the Indy 500, Dana Mecum’s Original Spring Classic has grown into one of the largest muscle car auctions in the country. Its 30th anniversary sale set a then-record $55.6 million across 1,208 cars sold, headlined by a $1.45 million Porsche and a Vault Find Corvette that drew a moment of silence for its late owner. Less than a decade later, the same event was moving over three times that much money.
Frank and Tina Ayres spent about five years turning a 1958 Chevrolet shortbed Fleetside into something that rides and stops like a modern vehicle while looking like it never left 1959. The build passed through a now-defunct trade school campus and a Sacramento custom shop, picked up a Heidts Mustang II front end and a 350 small-block along the way, and ends on Coker wide whitewalls. It also starts an argument about what year it actually is. Read on for the details.
When Ford pulled the covers off the 2018 Mustang convertible, the biggest news was not what got added. It was what quietly disappeared from the order sheet after decades of being the default choice for droptop buyers. What replaced it split the lineup into two extremes with nothing in the middle, and gave the convertible a dashboard that had no business being in a pony car. Read on for what changed.
Brian Makse takes the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat Widebody out for a first drive built around one real question: does borrowing the Demon’s flared fenders actually make the Hellcat better, or just meaner-looking? Commenters overwhelmingly say Dodge finally got the Challenger’s proportions right — and at least one viewer credits this exact review with convincing them to buy one. Watch to see whether the width lives up to the hype.