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In 2016, the muscle car market was shrinking almost everywhere except one corner of it – Hellcat sales climbed nearly 70 percent while overall Challenger and Charger volumes both fell. The family SUV mentioned almost in passing in this piece would eventually get the same supercharged treatment, at a price tag nobody saw coming back then.
The Dodge Challenger SRT Demon was engineered to lift its front wheels off the line from the factory, with 840 horsepower and a 9.65 second quarter mile. So when a prototype turned up at a racing event with an audible engine knock, the question everyone had been quietly asking finally surfaced. Read on for what detonation actually does to a supercharged engine, and why a prototype failure is not the same as a design flaw.
Two enormous Corvette stories broke at nearly the same moment: credible spy footage of a mid-engine car running with minimal camouflage, and reports that the final front-engine ZR1 was close to being finalized. The Corvette community had to decide which one to argue about first. Read on to find out how both stories eventually resolved, and which side of the argument the results favored.
A supercharged 6.2-liter Camaro ZL1 against a supercharged 6.2-liter Challenger Hellcat should have been the definitive answer to an argument that has run for decades. The Hellcat has 57 more horsepower. The ZL1 gives away 566 pounds. The manufacturer quarter-mile figures and the 0-60 figures point in opposite directions. Then the actual race happened and satisfied nobody at all. Read on for why the spec sheet and the strip disagreed.
The 2017 New York International Auto Show had plenty of new metal on the floor, but one car made everything around it look conservative. Dodge brought a production Challenger engineered almost entirely around a single number on a drag strip timeslip, and it was willing to delete parts of the interior to get there. Read on to find out what Dodge actually built, and why the NHRA banned it before anyone bought one.
A field of 461 classic and collector cars rolled across the block in Portland over a single June weekend, but one blue-and-black Camaro with an unusually clean paper trail ended up outselling everything else in the building. The final tally topped $7.9 million by the time the last gavel fell. Here’s which cars actually commanded the biggest numbers.
Edmunds put a 2018 Camaro SS and a 2018 Mustang GT through track and street testing, expecting the usual story about 0-60 bragging rights. The real gap turned out to be philosophical, not numerical — a pushrod LT1 versus a dual-cam Coyote, and two very different answers to what a pony car chassis should reward. Read on to find out which car editors Carlos Lago and Mark Takahashi decided actually does fun better.
The Pontiac GTO sits near the top of any credible list of great muscle cars, and its most theatrical variant took its name from a comedian’s catchphrase on a late-1960s sketch show. The particular 1970 Judge that ended up in Jay Leno’s garage carries a 366-horsepower engine, a four-speed, a hood-mounted tachometer, and an owner who runs one of the biggest names in classic tire manufacturing. The naming story alone is worth the detour.
Ford built roughly 50 genuine Cobra Jet Mustangs in each limited run since reviving the nameplate in 2008 – and every one of them was designed to run a specific index number, not chase outright records. This car left that rulebook behind entirely, pulling 1,400 horsepower from just 305 cubic inches of supercharged Coyote. Read on for how the outlaw racing scene around cars like this got started, and why a small-block ended up making numbers Ford never advertised.
A tip in Indiana led to a Dodge Super Bee that had sat behind a closed garage door for forty years, ever since its original engine let go and the owner simply chose to store it rather than restore or part it out. Only a small fraction of 1970 Super Bees carried this six-barrel big-block setup. Here’s how rare this survivor really is.
A 1965 Plymouth Belvedere II hardtop in stock trim, running a 440 with performance work done, looks like it rolled off a period drag strip. There is a wrinkle in that description worth knowing about, because the 440 did not exist in 1965 and the 426 Hemi you could get that year was not sold for street use. Here is what Plymouth actually offered, what the Belvedere II was, and why honest big-block survivors keep climbing.
A magazine editor once tucked a tear-off postcard into an article about a modified Mustang and told readers to mail it straight to Ford. Enough of them did that Detroit listened, and one of the most collectible Mustangs of the entire era followed. Read on to find out who Eric Dahlquist was, how he got there, and what his campaign actually produced.
A supercharged Hemi wasn’t the surprising part of the Charger SRT Hellcat – the stopwatch numbers were. This four-door family sedan runs 0-60 in roughly 3.6 seconds and tops out near 204 mph, numbers that would embarrass plenty of dedicated two-door muscle cars. Here’s how Dodge built a genuine supercar into a car meant for car seats.
OldCarMemories.com sets out to prove that a genuine muscle car can still be bought for under $5,000 — and the comment section immediately pushes back, pointing out the thumbnail alone is worth half a million dollars. Behind the debate is a real split in how the muscle car market has evolved, between six-figure numbers-matching cars and the base-trim versions of the same nameplates that remain surprisingly attainable. See which five cars actually made the cut.
Dodge built the only all-wheel-drive American muscle coupe ever sold, and then gave it a V6 instead of a Hemi. The 2017 Challenger GT made 305 horsepower, started at $33,395, and sent up to 38 percent of its torque forward only when it decided the situation called for it. That combination confused a lot of shoppers. It also answered a complaint Dodge had been hearing from buyers in snow states for years.