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The Camaro ZL1 already had 650 supercharged horsepower and a chassis built to embarrass sports cars twice its price. The 1LE package left that engine untouched and rebuilt everything else instead, chasing a sub-7:17 Nurburgring lap through dampers, aero, and lighter wheels. Read on to see how a track-only variant of an already extreme car earned its own legend.
Ryan takes the 2018 Ford Mustang GT Premium into the California desert to test its sound modes, 10-speed automatic, launch control, and line lock — then issues a mid-review correction on how it actually stacks up against the Camaro SS. Watch to see why this review is still drawing comparisons to the Challenger Scat Pack years later.
Ford built 24,946 Rancheros for 1971 and only 3,632 of them wore the GT badge. Fewer still left the factory with the 429 Super Cobra Jet, an engine that made this car-based pickup quick enough to run with a Chevelle SS 454. It was also the last year that combination existed, which is why finding a correct one takes years rather than weekends. Here is what made the 1971 Ranchero GT worth the search.
A 1969 Charger Daytona and a modern Charger Hellcat parked nose to nose look like a fifty-year technology gap, and in most respects they are. But the older car still holds an aerodynamic claim the newer one cannot match, achieved with an 18-inch nose cone, a wing tall enough to reach clean air, and a wind tunnel program run on a scale model. Only 503 were built, all for a single purpose: winning at 200 mph.
The 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon made 840 horsepower from its supercharged 6.2-liter HEMI V8, ran the quarter mile in 9.65 seconds, and became so extreme that NHRA banned it from record-legal drag competition. Dodge built only 3,000 for the US market, charged extra for a passenger seat, and gave it a widebody kit just to put the power down. Read on to find out what it took to build a street-legal car too fast for its own sport’s rulebook.
Do the people who build cars actually drive them? When automakers were asked, the answer was mostly yes, with employees strongly encouraged to be seen in the product, helped along by programs like GM’s employee discount, Ford’s A-Plan, and Audi’s 10 percent staff pricing. Beyond the discounts sit unwritten rules, plant-floor pressure, and a few stories of loyalty enforced harder than any policy admits. Read on to find out how far it really goes.
Beyond the well-known bargains, plenty of affordable muscle car ownership still hides in plain sight. Cars like the Chevrolet Nova, Dodge Dart Sport, and Buick Skylark deliver real small-block performance for a fraction of what a comparable Camaro or Mustang costs. The simple reason: fewer buyers chase these badges, which keeps demand, and prices, refreshingly low.
A straight trade between two muscle car enthusiasts in 1977 turned into one of the great sleeper stories of the era: a 1969 GTX swapped for a dark green, unassuming 1970 Ford Torino packing the Super Cobra Jet engine and factory drag pack. Read on for the specs behind the sleeper — and the dollar-on-the-dash trick that proved just how quick it really was.
By 1972, Chevrolet had already taken away the engine option that once made the Nova SS a genuine threat at the drag strip, and buyers kept ordering the package anyway. In fact they ordered more of them than the year before. The 200-horsepower rating on the window sticker looks feeble until you understand what changed about how Detroit measured horsepower that year. Here is what the SS package actually bought, and why owners stay so loyal.
Jeff Beck once said he nearly quit guitar to build hot rods at Roy Brizio’s South San Francisco shop, and Beck is far from the most famous name on the client list. The son of hot rod pioneer Andy Brizio, Roy opened his own shop in 1977, won America’s Most Beautiful Roadster in 1987 with a Ferrari V12-powered 1932 Ford, and has built fourteen cars for Eric Clapton alone. Read on to find out how a quiet shop became a legend within the hobby.
A 1967 Chevelle built for a road course sounds like a contradiction, because these cars were engineered for straight lines and stoplights. Chad Hill and the crew at Hot Rod Chassis and Cycle built one anyway, called it Rush, and gave it a splitter, a wing, a Ridetech cage and enough LS power to justify all of it. Making a fifty-year-old A-body actually turn takes far more than bolting on aero. Here is what the job really involves.
Long before Tallahassee had a legal place to race, drivers settled things on remote Leon County roads like Mission Road, with spectators in leather and denim watching from the shoulders. The community’s answer was a sanctioned strip on west Highway 20, built in the mid-1960s as drag racing nationwide moved out of the shadows. Read on for what the strip offered, why the outlaw scene never fully went away, and what became of tracks like this one.
A dashboard puck that plugged into any car and projected navigation, texts, and calls onto the windshield sounded like the future in 2015. Navdy raised over a million dollars in a week and shipped thousands of units before quietly shutting down in 2017. Here is what doomed one of the most promising aftermarket heads-up displays ever built.
A record crowd of 90,000 turned out when Barrett-Jackson brought its collector car auction to Mohegan Sun Casino for the first time. More than 500 vehicles sold for over $26 million, led by a 1969 Chevrolet Corvette L88. See what made this Northeast debut one for the record books — and why it’s still growing.
A stroked LS3 and a ten-mile traffic jam near the California-Nevada line were all it took to strand Project Orange Krate, the Chevy High Performance 1971 Camaro, on the shoulder of Interstate 15 after the 2017 Holley LS Fest West. With Vette and Street Rodder editor Brian Brennan in the passenger seat and no working fuel gauge, it became a lesson every pro-touring builder eventually learns: horsepower changes your fuel math more than you think.