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Car Craft brought a 1968 Chevrolet Chevelle SS396 hardtop to Irwindale dragstrip in November 1967 expecting the 375-horsepower L78 to dominate the timeslip. Writer John Raffa came away frustrated instead, and said so in print in the February 1968 issue. That contradiction, a genuinely fast car that still disappointed the man driving it, says more about muscle car era expectations than any dyno figure. Read on to find out what quarter-mile testing actually measured.
In 2016, a panel of 17 women from 14 countries named the Ford Mustang their Women’s Performance Car of the Year, with the Ford Focus RS finishing a close second. The honor pushed back on decades of man’s-car marketing built around the Mustang, while the rest of the muscle car world kept moving too — Classic Performance Products modernized vintage handling, Mopar rolled out new support for grassroots NHRA Sportsman racers, and Hellcat-themed toys sold out before Christmas. Read on for the full roundup of what was happening across the muscle car world that year.
To mark eighty years of the Mopar name, Dodge built a Challenger nobody could easily buy: 160 cars total, split evenly between two hand-applied two-tone paint schemes, based on the 485-horsepower T/A 392 and loaded with catalog performance parts. Each one carried a serialized badge and shipped with a signed original drawing of that specific car. Read on for what the anniversary edition actually included and why a parts brand built it at all.
In the summer of 2017 Chevrolet sent a 2018 Camaro ZL1 1LE around the 12.9-mile Nordschleife with a six-speed manual gearbox and production Goodyear tyres, and stopped the clock at 7:16.04. That lap beat a Ferrari 488 GTB, a Nissan GT-R and a Mercedes SLS AMG, and left only one American production car ahead of it. The margin over the automatic ZL1 was 13.56 seconds. Read on to find out what actually made the difference.
Doug DeMuro calls the 2019 Corvette ZR1 the ultimate Corvette in this review, working through the supercharged LT5 V8 and the quirks that earned it his signature DougScore. The comments are just as entertaining as the car, endless “Doug is the type of guy” jokes, plus one pointed reminder that the mid-engine C8 arrived not long after. Watch to see if the ZR1’s case still holds up.
SRT had a naming convention for its most powerful V8s, and it involved fighter planes. Then the small team developing the Challenger SRT Demon needed something quieter, and the 840-horsepower engine ended up named after a round blue cat from a 1961 Hanna-Barbera cartoon. The name stuck through years of secret development and it is still what insiders call the engine. Read on for the story and what Benny actually became.
Dodge built an entire verification system just to keep its own dealers from overcharging customers on the hyped Challenger SRT Demon, requiring a notarized sales document before any order could move forward. Where a car landed in the build queue depended on numbers most buyers never think about. Read on to find out how the Demon concierge desk actually worked.
The 1966 Buick Skylark Gran Sport carried a 401-cubic-inch nailhead V8 that Buick was obliged to advertise as a 400, because GM had capped intermediate engine displacement at that figure. It made 325 horsepower and a genuinely enormous 445 lb-ft of torque, which is how the engine got its Wildcat 445 name. It also cost meaningfully more than a GTO. Read on for why Buick’s muscle car was the fastest one nobody bought.
Jeff Lutz has built three 1957 Chevy race cars, and this one is the culmination of everything the first two taught him plus what he learned campaigning a Pro Mod 1969 Camaro. The new car returns to steel roof and quarter panels, satisfying both class rules and the standards set on Street Outlaws. Lutz was the first Drag Week competitor to average in the six-second range. Read on for what makes the third attempt different.
A private tour through the Martin Auto Museum’s 170-plus vehicles gave nine-year-old Blake a walk through automotive history — from an 1886 Benz to a Duesenberg once linked to Al Capone’s inner circle. Surrounded by that much irreplaceable history, it was still the modern muscle cars that held his attention longest. See what makes this Phoenix collection, and its youngest fans, stand out.
Seal Beach’s Main Street show has grown from a modest 1980s sidewalk-sale add-on into one of Southern California’s largest beachside car gatherings, drawing 25,000 to 35,000 visitors to a town far smaller than its own crowd. This milestone edition brought sunshine, live music, and hundreds of showstoppers lined up along the coast. See how a small surf town built one of the region’s biggest car shows.
The Mile High Show and Shine Car Show has run for 12 years in Lead, South Dakota, but it’s riding on a hometown tradition that dates back to 1926, when Homestake Mining Company threw a party celebrating 50 years of Black Hills mining. Over 100 cars from America’s automotive past still turn out every year for a parade-and-judging format where attendees vote on their own favorites. Here’s how a car show earned its place in a century-old celebration.
A 1969 Dodge Daytona spent nine years sitting in a Kansas City junkyard, one of roughly fifty impounded cars slowly waiting their turn at the crusher after a used-car dealer’s title fraud scheme collapsed. One collector’s memory of a Richard Petty magazine ad is the only reason it still exists, and the deal he struck to save it was stranger than most restoration stories get. Read on for how it ended up winning a Concours Gold award decades later.
Before it ever appeared on screen, “Maximus” was already one of the most ambitious Mopar builds anywhere — a 1968 Dodge Charger built by Tom Nelson of Nelson Racing Engines, discovered by a film crew at the SEMA trade show. Over 2,000 hours of bodywork and roughly 2,000 horsepower later, it closed out Fast & Furious 7 by recreating a scene from the franchise’s original 2001 film.
For most of automotive history, more power meant worse fuel economy, and everyone accepted the trade. Then both numbers started improving at the same time, and the average new car quietly got faster than a 1970s muscle car while returning double the mileage. Read on for the specific technologies that broke the old compromise, and what it means for anyone shopping for performance today.