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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.
When longtime dealer Bob Taylor retired after 37 years running his own classic car shop, he didn’t just sell off the inventory — he mentored his successor into building a new showroom nearby. The result is a 6,500-square-foot space in El Paso that feels, by Taylor’s own admission, eerily similar to the shop he just closed. Read on for the story behind the handoff.
For years General Motors banned engines larger than 400 cubic inches from its mid-size cars. When that rule lifted for 1970, Chevrolet immediately dropped a 454 into the Chevelle SS, and it arrived in two very different forms. The LS6 got the headlines at 450 horsepower, but the LS5 outsold it and outlasted it. Here is what separated the two engines and why an original LS5 survivor matters.
A private collector’s classified ad seeking any 1968-1972 Plymouth Road Runner or GTX, project or finished, highlights just how differently these two closely related muscle cars are remembered decades later. Built on the same platform but aimed at completely different buyers, telling them apart takes more than a glance at the badge. Read on to find out exactly what separates a genuine GTX from a Road Runner, and why the distinction matters so much to serious buyers.
Brainerd International Raceway traces back to 1968, when it opened as Donnybrooke Speedway carved through the woods of central Minnesota. Its Muscle Car Series crowns a champion across three races rather than one, and last year’s Outlaw Class came down to a single point between three drivers. Read on for how modern doorslammers running six-second quarter miles at over 200 mph trace back to the same platforms that ran the 13s in the 1960s.