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Ford’s Mustang beat the Camaro and Challenger for a fifth straight month in March 2017, extending a streak to 27 wins in 29 months, but the raw sales totals hid a steep year-over-year decline. This piece unpacks the numbers behind that streak, why Camaro and Challenger were actually closing the gap underneath it, and what a winning streak built on a shrinking base actually signals.
Eleanor tributes have become so common on the show circuit that most of them disappear into the crowd, wearing identical gray paint and identical black stripes. This 1967 G.T. 500 was built by an owner who clearly decided that was the whole problem, keeping the fastback bones everyone recognizes while throwing out the formula that makes the rest interchangeable. They call it the Pit Viper. Read on to find out what makes it different.
For the first time in at least seven years, the Dodge Challenger outsold both the Ford Mustang and Chevrolet Camaro in a single month, arriving right as the 840-horsepower SRT Demon dominated headlines. This piece looks at the June 2017 sales numbers behind that milestone, the year-to-date totals that told a very different story, and what became of Challenger’s long production run afterward.
At one of the oldest drag strips in the country, Karen Stalba has spent 20-plus years running alcohol dragsters, cars fast enough to leave muscle cars in the dust. This weekend’s NHRA Lucas Oil Series brought 450-plus cars to historic Atco Dragway, a track with a record-setting past dating back to the 1960s. Here’s what made this South Jersey race weekend stand out.
A preview of 2018’s new-car debuts could not have predicted how wild the model year would actually get. Alongside redesigned sedans, Kia’s rear-drive Stinger, Lexus’s V8 LC coupe, and the first American Civic Type R, Dodge was finishing an 840-horsepower Challenger SRT Demon built specifically for the drag strip. Here is how a year full of sensible launches ended up defined by a street-legal quarter-mile weapon.
By 2016, the Ford Mustang had transformed from a beloved but provincial American icon into a genuine global performance car, built at the factory in right-hand-drive for the first time in the nameplate’s history. Independent rear suspension and a chassis tuned for corners rather than just straight lines opened waiting lists across dozens of new countries. Read on to find out what made 2016 the Mustang’s breakout year worldwide.
GME Performance, a Leipzig tuning shop most American enthusiasts have never heard of, built a Mustang GT making 705 horsepower and 590 lb-ft, enough to put a stock Hellcat on notice. What separates it from the usual dyno-number flex is everything that came with it: adjustable coil-overs, ventilated floating brake discs, a full aero kit, and a 3.9-second 0-62 time. Read on for how the build came together and how it stacks up against Ford’s own factory answers.
Engine Masters takes a completely stock Chevrolet 305 small-block, keeps its original cast crank, rods, and pistons untouched, and feeds it nitrous until something finally gives out. Along the way, one host delivers a line about nitrous and human error that viewers still quote, and a perfectly timed Spanish slang word becomes its own small viral moment. Watch to find out exactly how much a genuinely stock 305 can take before it lets go.
A three-minute Vox explainer makes a simple case: the left lane is for passing, not cruising, and the rule is already printed in every driver’s manual. The comments underneath it tell a different story, including one long-distance driver’s account of getting boxed into passing a semi on the right after being stuck behind a left-lane camper. Watch to see how deep the frustration actually runs.
Underneath the vintage 1970 Mustang bodywork on this SEMA 2016 showstopper, called ‘Vicious,’ sits a Nissan GT-R chassis and drivetrain — a body swap precise enough that even close-up video had commenters asking what they were actually looking at. It shared the spotlight with a wide-body Dodge Charger one viewer described as ‘a mile wide, two miles long, and six inches tall,’ plus a custom ‘Shomad’ Nomad wagon. See the build that fooled an entire comment section.
Beyond the ZL-1 Camaro and Hemi ‘Cuda convertible, the rarest American muscle cars share a pattern collectors have only recently caught onto: overlooked badges, one-year-only engine options, and production runs smaller than a typical high school graduating class. The Buick GSX Stage 1, built just 846 times across three years, is the clearest proof that rarity doesn’t always announce itself at the time.
Adding a hundred horsepower to most muscle cars means a shopping list: bigger brakes, stiffer springs, wider tires, a stronger differential. The sixth-generation Camaro SS largely shrugs that process off, thanks to a GM Alpha platform shared with Cadillac and a significant weight reduction over the car it replaced. Bolt on a supercharger and the LT1’s 455 horsepower climbs into ZL1 territory. Read on for what the chassis handles on its own, and what it genuinely does not.
Every August, the Bonneville Salt Flats fill with streamliners, lakesters, and vintage muscle cars chasing a record that could vanish within a year. Speed Week traces back to 1937, when a handful of Southern California car clubs founded the SCTA to bring order to dry-lake racing. By 2017’s 69th running, it had become something rarer: a motorsport with no purse, no crowd, and nothing to prove except how fast you really are.
The 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon made 808 horsepower on pump gas and 840 on race fuel, ran a certified 9.65-second quarter mile, and lifted its front wheels hard enough to earn a Guinness record. It also arrived with a steel crate of drag parts, a factory transbrake, and an air conditioner repurposed to chill the intake charge. Dodge built it for a single model year and then walked away. Read on for what it actually took to get there.
Dodge spent most of 2017 selling a car nobody had actually seen, teasing the 2018 Challenger SRT Demon one cryptic clip at a time while the internet invented numbers to fill the silence. What finally rolled onto the New York auto show stage carried 840 horsepower, a transbrake, and a front-tire trick no production car had ever managed. Only 3,300 were built for the United States. Read on for what Dodge actually engineered into it.