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Ed Wood built a 1964 Chevrolet Malibu with two Oldsmobile V8s under a stretched hood, decided 500 horsepower was insufficient, and replaced both of them with a surplus Allison V-1710 — the twelve-cylinder aircraft engine that powered the P-38 Lightning and the earliest P-51 Mustangs. It displaced 1,710 cubic inches. It was street-legal. Read on for how a warbird engine ends up in a mid-size Chevy.
Steve McQueen did much of his own driving in the Bullitt chase scene — a 1968 Ford Mustang GT pursuing a Dodge Charger through San Francisco with no CGI and famously little music. Decades later, fans are still finding new details: a recurring green VW Bug, impossible geography between shots, and a scene that Mopar owners and Mustang fans both claim as their own. Watch the chase that’s still the benchmark everyone else gets measured against.
Somewhere out there is a muscle car that looks entirely ordinary and is quietly worth more than the house it is parked behind. The difference between a $50,000 car and a seven-figure one usually comes down to a build sheet, an engine code, and a body style. Here is what actually drives values at the top of the collector market, and which cars have run away from the pack while others sat still.
Bloodshed Motors dropped two electric motors into a 1968 Ford Mustang shell and built Zombie 222 — a car that hits 60 mph in 2.4 seconds and finishes the quarter mile in 10.7, outrunning nearly every gas-powered muscle car ever built. Not everyone in the comments is convinced electric conversions belong in classic bodies. The debate is as much a part of the story as the numbers.
The Original Super Chevy Show’s stop in Martin, Michigan runs on a track with real history: US131 Motorsports Park started life as Martin Dragway back in 1962, long before a million renovation turned it into today’s national-touring-ready facility. The event’s entry rule is just as distinctive, any car can compete, even a Mustang, as long as it’s GM-powered. Here’s what made this particular weekend more than just another drag meet.
Gar Robinson beat former Indy Lights champion Rafa Matos in a two-lap shootout to win the Trans Am Muscle Car Challenge TA2 race at Belle Isle in Detroit. The victory closed out a chase his father George had started at the same event back in 1988. Camaros, a Mustang, and a Challenger filled the top four spots, which is exactly the kind of finish TA2 was built to produce.
Nelson Bandy spent years trying to buy a 1968 Shelby GT500KR convertible from a young married couple in a small Tennessee town, and every time he asked, the answer was no. Then the car disappeared in 1978 and stayed gone for nearly four decades. Its reappearance closed a chapter that started with a chance sighting on a main street. Read on to find out what makes a KR convertible worth a forty-year wait.
A 1969 Boss 429 sat in a North Dakota building for nearly forty years waiting on a do-it-yourself restoration that never happened. When it finally reached a professional shop in Wisconsin, the first job was not paint or panels. It was a careful, almost archaeological disassembly to work out what four decades of storage had done underneath. Read on to find out why the undercarriage decides whether a car like this is worth saving.
The 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon arrived with 840 horsepower, a factory-fitted set of drag radials, and a launch violent enough that the NHRA effectively told owners they could not run it as delivered. Dodge built only 3,300 of them across a single model year, then closed the door for good. Here is what made the Demon different from the Hellcat it was built on, and why one 2.92-foot wheelie changed how everyone talks about factory muscle.
Deep inside a Wisconsin barn, under a stripe of bird droppings and a small mountain of collapsed hay, sat two of Mopar’s rarest aero warriors: a 1969 Dodge Charger 500 and a 1970 Plymouth Superbird, untouched for the better part of thirty years. Their owner found each one through a different stroke of luck, a vague classified ad and a tip from a wing car club, decades before either car ever left the barn. Read on to find out how both cars ended up parked together, and why one of them still wears its original barn hay to car shows.
Every August, one stretch of Pennsylvania drag strip pavement hosts what has grown into the World’s Largest One-Day Mustang Show, drawing more than 1,400 cars and thousands of spectators for a single day of racing, showing, and charity fundraising. Six decades of Mustang history share the same show field. Read on to find out what it takes to pull off a gathering this size without it collapsing into gridlock.
Mecum’s 2017 Kissimmee auction ran ten days, moved nearly 2,700 cars across the block, and closed with more than million in total sales. Headline results included a ,000 Maserati Ghibli Spider and a rare ,000 Tuxedo Black Corvette convertible, while online viewership set records of its own. Here’s a look back at the auction that traditionally sets the tone for the entire collector car year.
Every original 1977 Trans Am used in Smokey and the Bandit was destroyed after filming, leaving replicas as the only way to own a piece of the film’s legacy. Burt Reynolds commissioned his own painstaking recreation, drove it for tens of thousands of miles, and it later sold at auction for ,500 – with a similar Reynolds-owned replica later fetching over ,000. Here’s why collectors pay real money for a car that’s technically not the original.
Classic Recreations, the only shop officially licensed to build continuation Shelby Mustangs, just did something purists never saw coming: it dropped a turbocharged EcoBoost engine into a car built to honor Carroll Shelby’s big-block legacy. Owner Jason Engel says the move isn’t about abandoning tradition, it’s about keeping a niche, hand-built business alive in markets where displacement taxes make a big V8 impractical. Read on to find out how a turbocharged Shelby continuation stacks up against the original.
Chevrolet’s Camaro ZL1 1LE gives up nearly sixty horsepower to the Dodge Challenger Hellcat on paper, yet it laps a road course faster than the supercharged Mopar has ever managed. The gap comes down to what each manufacturer actually optimized for – straight-line traction versus corner-carving grip – in a horsepower war that shows no sign of ending. Read on to see how Chevrolet closed the gap without matching the Hellcat’s number.