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The 2017 Ford Mustang GT did not win its reputation by having the biggest horsepower number in the showroom, because it did not have it. The Camaro SS made more, the Hellcat made far more, and Ford’s own Shelby GT350 made nearly a hundred more. Yet reviewers kept coming back to the 435-horsepower 5.0 as the one that got the whole formula right. Read on to find out what Ford changed around the engine.
Midnight Drags at the 2017 Car Craft Summer Nationals marked the event’s first year at its new home, Beech Bend Raceway Park in Bowling Green, Kentucky. A 42-car field battled it out until Michael Goodman’s 1969 Nova came out on top with an 8.01-second pass at 163 mph. The night was successful enough that organizers brought the event back in 2018 with an expanded two-day format.
Chevrolet’s 2019 Corvette ZR1 arrived after years of speculation, packing a supercharged LT5 V8 and the largest rear wing ever offered on a production Corvette. This breakdown covers the details that turned rumor into one of the most respected Corvette generations among enthusiasts. Fans in the comments call it nothing short of Big Nasty. Watch to see why the nickname stuck.
Dodge spent months teasing the 2018 Challenger SRT Demon without showing a single performance number, leaning instead on the idea that cold, dense air is what really makes a muscle car. When the specs finally landed, they made the teasing look modest: 840 horsepower, a 9.65-second quarter mile, a factory transbrake, an air conditioner repurposed to chill the intake, and a Guinness record for lifting the front wheels off the ground.
Cleaning bare metal is the least glamorous job in any restoration, and getting it wrong can ruin paint months after the car leaves the booth. Chemical dipping traps acid in seams. Sandblasting warps panels and carries a silica hazard. Coal slag sits in between, with real advantages and a health asterisk most shops never mention. Here is how the media choices actually break down, and where each one belongs.
Jeff says he’d never seen this rusted-bolt removal method demonstrated properly on camera, and a comment section full of working mechanics agrees it’s the clearest version of the technique online. Heat, rapid cooling, and a little patience solve a problem that torches, sockets, and days of penetrating oil couldn’t touch on one Wisconsin viewer’s rusted exhaust manifold. For anyone restoring a car that spent decades outdoors, this is essential knowledge.
A nitro Top Fuel car has no transmission and no gear changes, which means the clutch alone meters roughly eleven thousand horsepower to the tires across the entire run. It is tuned by adding and removing steel counterweights measured in grams, runs at friction temperatures near 3,700 degrees, and gets rebuilt between nearly every round. Here is how the system actually works, and why the clutch is where a nitro race is really won.
Ford pulled strangers off the street at Irwindale Speedway in 2017, handed them a new Mustang, and told them to make smoke. The occasion was line lock becoming standard on every 2018 Mustang, four-cylinder EcoBoost models included, not just the V8 GT. Here is exactly what the system does to the brakes, why drag racers have used the trick for decades, and the fifteen-second limit almost nobody mentions.
For 2017, Dodge let R/T Scat Pack buyers order the Dynamics Package and walk away with forged 20-inch wheels and six-piston Brembo brakes pulled straight from the SRT 392 and Hellcat parts bin, all for $2,200. What Dodge would not share was the supercharger, and that decision was entirely deliberate. Here is what the package actually changed, what it left alone, and why it still matters on the used market.
Chevrolet already had a Camaro ZL1 that could embarrass six-figure exotics on a road course, so when engineers built a more extreme version they did the unexpected thing and left the 650-horsepower supercharged V8 completely alone. The 2018 ZL1 1LE found roughly three seconds a lap at GM’s Milford Road Course through dampers, tires, downforce, and about sixty pounds of deleted weight instead. From twenty feet away it looks nearly identical to the standard car. It is not.
A week behind the wheel of a 485-horsepower Dodge Challenger R/T Scat Pack in California taught seven distinct lessons about what a modern muscle car actually demands from a daily driver, from throttle modulation to fuel stops to the constant attention it draws in ordinary parking lots. None of these lessons show up on a spec sheet, and most only became clear after days of real-world driving rather than a quick test drive. Read on to find out what surprised a first-time Scat Pack driver most.
Most hot rod builders chase horsepower with a turbocharger or a bigger cam, but a rare few skip straight to doubling their cylinder count. A 14-liter, 1,400-horsepower V16 sounds like a tall tale, yet it exists, and the original suggestion that LS swaps are a dime a dozen is hard to argue with. Read on for why sixteen cylinders are so rare, what it would take to fit one in a car, and why the idea refuses to go away.
A 2017 Dream Giveaway sweepstakes paired a numbers-matching 1967 Camaro RS with a Lingenfelter-built 2017 ZL1 pushing well past factory horsepower — plus $35,000 cash, all for a $3 ticket. The real story isn’t the prize total, it’s what Lingenfelter actually built before handing over the keys. Read on to find out.
Pontiac handed Hal Needham four Trans Ams to destroy for Smokey and the Bandit, and three of them did not survive filming. The fourth finished the shoot so beaten that crew had to push it into position. That wreckage turned a slow-selling coupe into Pontiac’s best seller and made Burt Reynolds inseparable from a black and gold Firebird. Here is what really happened behind the scenes, and what those cars command today.
A quiet fall on the local car show calendar usually means one of two things, and for the 2017 season, the answer became clear fast. Winter and spring brought a packed slate of shows back, and the crowd showing up looked different than longtime attendees expected. Read on to find out who was actually filling these events.