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Every October, a stretch of Wildwood beach turns into a time machine as pre-1934 hot rods and pre-1957 motorcycles line up to race the way drivers did generations ago. The event traces back to a club of World War II veterans chasing speed after coming home, and its no-modern-parts rules mean every slide through the sand is as unpredictable as it was decades ago. Here’s what makes this beach race one of the most photographed weekends on the hot rod calendar.
Not every muscle car story ends with a perfectly restored survivor in a climate-controlled garage. Longtime member Carl N.’s collection spans a 1970 Barracuda, two vintage Ford trucks, and a trade that eventually led to a Chevy van — a messier, more realistic version of what six decades of car ownership actually looks like. Here’s the history behind the cars in his story, and why this kind of winding path is more common than the highlight-reel restorations.
Southern California muscle car owners are used to driving year-round, rain or shine — mostly shine. So when the winter of 2016-17 turned into the wettest stretch the region had seen in years, weekend cruise spots emptied out and garage queens stayed parked. It capped off more than five years of drought in dramatic fashion. Here’s what actually happened, and why a little rain is a bigger deal for classics than it looks.
Renderings of a modern Ford Torino keep circulating online, and the reason has less to do with the artwork than with the original car’s unfinished story. Ford’s intermediate muscle car won a Car of the Year award, rewrote NASCAR aerodynamics, and then vanished into a badge nobody remembers. Read on for what the real Torino was, why it disappeared, and why no production revival has ever been confirmed.
One leaked photograph ended months of teasing and set up the strangest product launch in modern muscle car history. The Dodge Challenger SRT Demon arrived with 840 horsepower, drag radials on all four corners, a single seat as standard and a rulebook problem at the NHRA. Here is what Dodge actually built, why it was banned before deliveries started, and why only around 3,300 exist.
February 2017 produced a pony car sales result almost nobody predicted: the Dodge Challenger, on a platform already a decade old, comfortably outsold the freshly redesigned Chevrolet Camaro while the Ford Mustang took the month outright. The numbers said something uncomfortable about what buyers actually want from a muscle car. Read on for the figures and what they revealed about the segment.
Dodge spent months teasing the 2018 Challenger SRT Demon before admitting what it had actually built: a factory drag car with 840 horsepower, one seat, and a set of DOT-legal drag radials. The NHRA reacted before the car ever reached a customer. Read on for what the Demon really was, why only about 3,300 were built, and what those cars are worth now.
There’s a decades-old argument about which brand of American muscle actually deserves bragging rights, and at a test track outside Las Vegas, you can settle it with a stopwatch instead of an opinion. This roundup covers the Richard Petty Driving Experience’s American Muscle Car Challenge alongside a 145-car Barrett-Jackson consignment, a packed holiday cruise-in, and a widow’s tribute to her car-loving husband.
A burnout meant to entertain the crowd at Wayne Downtown Days went sideways in barely two or three seconds, sending a classic Camaro out of control on Michigan Avenue. What stopped it from reaching spectators wasn’t a barrier or a safety plan — it was a parked Ford Flex sitting at the curb. No one was hurt, but organizers didn’t downplay how close it came. Read on to find out what happened and why it keeps happening at cruise events nationwide.
Muscle cars run on a simple formula: big power, small price. Japan never quite matched that formula until Infiniti’s 2018 Q50 Red Sport 400 showed up with 400 horsepower, four doors, and a price tag tens of thousands below what a GT-R or RC F demands. First-drive reviewers loved the power but split hard on one specific detail. Here’s what stood out.
Dodge pulled 7,802 examples of the 2017 Challenger back to dealerships over a defect that never made a noise, never threw a check-engine light, and never showed up on a test drive. The problem lived entirely in software, and it involved the one thing every driver trusts without thinking: the letter P on the dash. Read on to find out what was actually going wrong inside the transmission.
This isn’t muscle car footage in the usual sense — it’s 1970s crash-test film, digitized from the A/V Geeks archive, built to prove a shoulder belt does something a lap belt alone can’t. One commenter, now 58, remembers the exact head-impact pattern this footage demonstrates from real wrecked cars growing up. Another credits Volvo’s decision to give away its seatbelt patent with saving countless lives. What does decades-old crash-test footage actually have to do with why the muscle car era ended the way it did?
An orange A-body sitting on a consignment lot in Dearborn looks period correct until it starts. What is under the hood was designed thirty-five years after the body was stamped, makes about 150 more horsepower than the engine that belongs there, and has become one of the most popular swaps in the Mopar world. Read on for why builders keep reaching for this particular engine instead of something newer.
A Shelby GT350R already sheds weight with carbon wheels and a deleted rear seat, and it still tips the scales around 3,700 pounds. A Wisconsin composites shop offers a fix: replace the entire steel body with carbon fiber. The full treatment costs roughly what the car does. Individual fenders come out under two pounds. Read on for how the pricing tiers break down and where the weight actually goes.
Everyone who owns a Mopar uses the word constantly — almost nobody agrees on what it actually stands for. Regular Car Reviews’ Roman traces it back to 1937, when ‘Motor Parts’ became Chrysler’s parts-division shorthand, long before it meant anything about performance. The comments aren’t satisfied with the real answer, though, offering up ‘MO’ PO’ER,’ ‘Many Odd Parts Arranged Randomly,’ and half a dozen other competing definitions. Which version has actually been driving the culture all along?