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Car and Driver rides shotgun in the new Chevrolet Corvette ZR1 at Willow Springs International Raceway, a demanding high-speed circuit known as “The Fastest Road in the West.” The track’s unforgiving sweepers are exactly the kind of test that separates real aerodynamic grip from marketing claims. Watch to see how GM’s most track-focused Corvette handles it.
The Bugatti Chiron’s speedometer reads to 310 mph, but the car is electronically limited to 261, and the reason is not the engine. It is the tires, which are asked to survive forces that required a test facility originally built for space shuttle rubber. Read on for what actually happens to a tire at those speeds, why the limiter exists, and what happened when Bugatti finally took it off.
About 1,500 muscle cars, hot rods, and customs rolled through Galesburg, Illinois on a Tuesday morning in June 2017 as HOT ROD Power Tour passed through on the leg from Davenport to Champaign, briefly bringing the town’s old cruising strip back to life. A railroad city known for Carl Sandburg and Knox College, and not a Route 66 town despite common assumptions, got a morning of Detroit iron instead. Read on to find out why the moment meant so much to the people on the curb.
Tom Cotter’s Barn Find Hunter tracked down a numbers-matching 1954 Chevrolet Corvette and its original Blue Flame Six engine, tucked into a collection that also holds a 1970 Buick GS Stage 1 convertible, a big-block El Camino, and a warehouse of dusty Italian sports cars including an ASA 1000 GT nicknamed the “baby Ferrari.” Few barn find episodes cover this much ground in one visit. Watch to see what else Cotter uncovers.
A reader-submitted photo caught this Dodge Challenger SRT Demon prototype resting in a Colorado parking lot months before its official reveal — an early look at what would become the quickest production car ever built at the time, one so extreme the NHRA banned it from sanctioned events. Read on to find out what was hiding under that camouflage.
In January 2017, Ford promised a hybrid Mustang with more low-end torque than the standard V8, backed by a canceled $1.6 billion Mexican plant and $700 million in Flat Rock upgrades. The 2020 target came and went without the car ever showing up. Read on for where that money and engineering effort actually went, and why Ford’s CEO says the idea isn’t dead yet.
One April 2018 news cycle delivered three very different performance bets at once: a turbocharged four-cylinder Camaro finally earning a 1LE badge, a BMW M2 Competition borrowing its engine from the M3/M4, and a Buick electric SUV concept promising supercar-quick acceleration. None of these would have made sense as performance news a decade earlier.
This Petty’s Garage Bootlegger Edition Ford Mustang is a true 1-of-1 prototype, packing 800 horsepower and a NASCAR-rooted name honoring the moonshine runners who helped invent stock car racing. Owner Phil Lutfy bought it the same night it debuted at a Scottsdale charity gala, drawn in by both its cause and its design. A hidden Whiskey 43 detail ties the whole theme together. Watch to see what 1-of-1 really looks like.
A stock 1970 Chevelle rolling into a SEMA hall would not turn a single head anymore, which is exactly the problem this pro-touring build was created to solve. Roughly 180 shop-built vehicles enter Battle of the Builders each year, and judges narrow that field to twelve finalists competing against trucks, off-roaders, and imports. Getting there means the sheet metal has to look untouched while nearly everything beneath it is replaced. Read on to find out what that actually takes.
Every Wednesday at Sonoma Raceway, California high schoolers line up against a real police car for a quarter-mile drag race, and it is completely legal. The program, called Top the Cops, was built by a retired officer who wanted to give teenagers a real outlet instead of a street corner. Now in its 23rd year, it has its own alumni. Watch to see how it actually works.
The Dodge Challenger SRT Demon arrived at the 2017 New York Auto Show with 840 horsepower, a certified 9.65-second quarter mile at 140 mph, and a Guinness record for lifting its front wheels off the line, and a portion of the internet still called it a letdown because rumors had promised four digits. Hennessey promised to fix it. What the shop actually built first was a Camaro. Here is how that detour played out, and the asterisk attached to that 840 figure.
A free monthly parking-lot meetup has quietly become the largest car gathering in the entire state of Oklahoma. See how Coffee and Cars OKC grew from a simple Saturday morning tradition into a genuine charity fundraiser. This particular meet carried extra weight, tied to the Oklahoma City Auto Show’s 100th anniversary.
Weld a stainless steel panel or exhaust tip and that shimmering rainbow discoloration is almost guaranteed to appear. It is not just cosmetic; it is chromium oxidizing and leaving the surface of your metal, which sets the stage for pitting corrosion later. Read on for what is really happening when stainless overheats, the vinegar, cleaner-paste, and mechanical fixes that remove it, and how to keep the rainbow from forming in the first place.
Mike and Jim Ring build cars for clients who can afford anything, unveil them to enormous crowds in Las Vegas every November, and then drive home to a Wisconsin town of fewer than two thousand people. The gap between those two facts is the most interesting thing about Ringbrothers. Read on for how a small-town body shop became one of the most recognizable names in the restomod world without ever moving.
Dropping a modern five- or six-speed into a classic muscle car sounds like a weekend job right up until the transmission is on the jack and the tunnel says no. Tremec’s TKO, TKX, and T-56 Magnum each solve a different set of problems, and choosing wrong costs far more than the gearbox itself. Read on for what actually determines whether a Tremec fits your car, and what the swap really costs once the parts list is honest.