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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.
No car show in the country claims a longer unbroken run than the one that kicks off the West Coast’s season every January — and its nine-foot America’s Most Beautiful Roadster trophy has been chased by legendary builders for generations. What started as a tightly focused 1950 roadster show in Oakland has grown into an everything-under-one-roof event covering tri-fives, muscle cars, customs, and rat rods.
A 2016 Camaro, Challenger, and Mustang went through the same violent small overlap crash test, and the three modern pony cars did not come out looking anywhere close to equal. A physics teacher breaks down exactly why using a whiteboard, a test track, and the wreckage itself, while the comments argue over whether the test format even reflects real-world driving. Watch to see which of Detroit’s three headline muscle cars held up best.
Dodge spent twelve separate teaser videos building up to the Challenger SRT Demon, and this installment hinted at something no factory muscle car had claimed before: a car sold with its own crate of drag strip tools. The Demon arrived with drag radials, a transbrake, and a horsepower figure that required a trip to the race gas pump. Read on to find out how far Dodge actually went to back up the “dual purpose” claim.
Justin Bieber’s Ferrari was just one of many high-profile cars at this Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale sale, alongside NASCAR and Hollywood names on hand for the show. The event traces back to a 1967 local car show turned annual auction empire. Here is how it grew, and why some of the cars on the block that day were not for profit at all.
From the outside it reads as a pearl orange Plymouth Cuda with a Hemi under the shaker, which is already a serious thing to own. Look through the driver’s window and the story changes completely, because the steering wheel is on the wrong side. Schwartz Performance built this E-body for an owner in India, and moving the wheel turned out to be the smallest part of the job. Read on to find out what had to move with it.
The dream of a low-buck muscle car bargain is still alive at every car show, and so are the stories of buyers who chased it home only to find rust, a mismatched engine, or a title problem. This article walks through why genuine bargains are so rare now, the checks that expose a bad deal before money changes hands, the costs that never appear on the sale sticker, and the one situation where a cheap muscle car is actually the smart buy. Read on to find out how to tell the difference.
Casey Underdahl and his father dragged a 1969 Camaro body from Georgia to Minnesota believing it was ready for paint. What they actually bought was a shell with filler and seam sealer hiding rust in the firewall, roof, and window channels. What came out the other end was a pro-touring car built to be judged on a stopwatch, not a show field. Read on to find out what it takes to make a G-machine that actually does everything.
Ahead of its New York Auto Show debut, rumors swirled that the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon would ship with just a driver’s seat and nothing else. The rumor turned out to be true, and it was only the beginning of a weight-loss campaign that stripped carpeting, sound-deadening, and even the power steering wheel controls in pursuit of one specific record. Read on to find out exactly how far Dodge went, and what buyers could still get back.
Dodge handed over the keys to a 707-horsepower Challenger SRT Hellcat and it delivered exactly the kind of experience the numbers promise, which is to say a slightly alarming one. But the Hellcat’s real significance was not the power figure. It was what that figure forced every other manufacturer in Detroit to do next, and how quickly Dodge itself made the car obsolete. Here is what actually made it work.