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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.
The State Street Nationals began in the 1990s as a small fundraiser for Santa Barbara’s Page Youth Center and has since grown into one of California’s largest downtown car shows, drawing 300-plus vehicles across roughly ten city blocks. Because every worker volunteers their time, 100 percent of the proceeds reach the charities involved. The cars are the draw, but the mission is what keeps it running.
Inline Tube’s annual open house has become the unofficial start of the Detroit car show season, and the latest one drew the biggest crowd in its history thanks to a rare stretch of wall-to-wall sunshine. The company started in a two-car garage in 1995, grew into a 28,000-square-foot facility, and now makes preformed brake and fuel lines across more than 14,000 tube patterns. Why does a parts manufacturer out-draw judged shows? Read on for how a factory parking lot became one of Michigan’s most anticipated spring gatherings.
Jeff Lutz has a pattern: flat black paint, twin-turbo big-blocks, 1957 Chevrolets, and Drag Week wins to back it all up. His newest build, unveiled at the Tri-Five Nationals, keeps the 540-cubic-inch big-block he has used before but steps up from 88mm to 98mm turbos in pursuit of roughly 3,500 horsepower. Read on to see how the new car fits the formula that made his two Mad Max ’57s and his Drag Week-winning Camaro famous.
In 1997 Chevrolet replaced the most successful American V8 ever built with a clean-sheet design that shared almost nothing with it but the layout. The LS1 brought an all-aluminum deep-skirt block, six-bolt mains, cathedral-port heads, and coil-near-plug ignition, and it became the default swap engine for an entire generation. Here is what changed, where the stock parts run out of room, and the unglamorous details that end fresh builds early.
Automakers build pilot cars to shake down a new model before the assembly line starts, then usually destroy them. That makes any survivor a genuinely strange thing to find in a driveway. This early-build 1970 Chevelle SS396 carries the sort of details that make researchers reach for a flashlight and start checking stampings. Read on to find out what the metal underneath would actually have to prove.
Larry F. bought his first car in 1977 for $400: a white 1970 Pontiac GTO that broke his father’s one rule about first cars. He spent two years rebuilding it, drove it for years, and sold it in 1988 for $800 before the muscle car market took off. Years later, walking through an Illinois junkyard with his son, he found out exactly what became of it. Read on to find out what he saw.
Two headline Challengers arrived in the same 2017 news cycle, and enthusiasts have been mixing them up ever since. The all-wheel-drive one was the Challenger GT, a Pentastar V6 coupe aimed at snow-belt buyers. The 840-horsepower one was the rear-drive SRT Demon that lifted its front wheels off the pavement and ran 9.65 at 140 mph. Here is what each car actually was, and why Dodge needed both at once.
The Dodge Challenger name has worn a lot of different cars over the decades — a 426 Hemi-powered muscle icon in 1970, a rebadged Mitsubishi import by 1978, and an 840-horsepower factory drag weapon by 2018. This video runs through all of it back to back, and the comment section reacts to every twist. Watch to see just how far one nameplate traveled.
Some builds put two things together that were never supposed to meet. Cleveland Power and Performance took a 1969 Dodge Charger body, a shape recognizable at fifty yards, and married it to a modern supercharged chassis that makes more than twice the horsepower the original engineers ever contemplated. Read on to find out why they swapped the body onto the frame instead of the engine into the car.