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A four-door family sedan that can out-accelerate two-seat sports cars sounds like a contradiction Detroit would never build — until Dodge wrapped a supercharged 707-horsepower HEMI in one and called it the Hellcat. Bone stock, it runs an 11-second quarter mile from a car that tips the scales at well over 4,500 pounds. Read on to find out exactly what Dodge crammed under that hood.
Doug DeMuro barely had time with the new 2019 Corvette ZR1 before filming, but touring it at its Dubai debut still turned into a look at the most powerful Corvette Chevrolet had ever built. Commenters could not resist joking about an American supercar getting its unveiling in a city built around European exotics. Watch to see the quirks DeMuro found anyway, and why this first look still gets rewatched years later.
This 1967 Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu wears SS badging on the outside, but the real story is underneath: a frame-off restoration built around a 5.3-liter LS V8, a 4L60E automatic, and a Quick Performance 9-inch rear end, all with just 15,000 miles logged since the rebuild. Listed out of Ubly, Michigan, it’s the kind of restomod that trades numbers-matching originality for a chassis built to keep up with modern traffic. Read on to see what else went into the build.
In February 2013, two brothers went looking for one very specific car: an unrestored 1971 Hemi ‘Cuda in a screaming factory color, with its original build sheet, a four-speed, and one owner from new. Plymouth built only 114 of these for the entire model year, and just 7 convertibles. What the brothers found inside three weeks turned out to be exactly what they were chasing. Read on to see how rare this car really is.
Before the 2018 model year, a rendering claiming to reveal a revived three-door Chevrolet Chevelle spread online, complete with invented horsepower figures and a suspiciously plausible price tag. It never happened — Chevrolet never built it, and the Camaro remained the brand’s only performance coupe. Read on to find out what the rumor actually claimed, and why fans wanted a modern Chevelle badly enough to believe it.
A 1964 Ford Falcon took home the Best Ford in a Ford award at the Back to the 50’s 2017 car show, an unusual win for a car built as economical transportation rather than a performance machine. Ford’s optional Sprint package added the Fairlane’s 260-cubic-inch V8 and a stiffer suspension, giving select Falcons real personality behind the wheel. The Falcon’s unibody platform also directly influenced the Mustang launched later that same model year. This deep dive covers why the humble Falcon earned its trophy.
The sixth-generation Camaro ZL1 was called the fastest muscle car on the market when it debuted at the New York Auto Show, but the number that proved it came a year later on Germany’s Nurburgring. A ZL1 1LE lapped the Nordschleife in 7:16.04, shaving 13.56 seconds off its own sibling without adding a single horsepower. Here is exactly where that time came from, and why it changed how the Camaro is judged.
Long before the Challenger Demon’s real specs were public, rumors claimed it would simply ‘rival’ the Hellcat and the next GT500. The reality blew past that modest framing entirely, an 840-horsepower supercharged HEMI, a 9.65-second quarter mile, and an NHRA-certified quarter-mile record the actual GT500 wouldn’t even show up to challenge for another three years.
A monthly parking-lot gathering outside a burger joint in North Little Rock might not sound like much, until the first Mustang rolls in and the crowd starts drifting toward it. It’s a small, informal version of a car culture ritual playing out in strip-mall lots across the country nearly every week. Here’s what keeps people showing up to admire cars they’ll never own.
When Kim Walker towed two decades-forgotten Corvettes into the 2017 Corvettes at Carlisle show, he figured they’d be an afterthought next to a building full of million-dollar L88s. Instead, these two overgrown Pennsylvania survivors — one still wearing the vegetation that had grown on it for years — became one of the show’s most talked-about attractions. Read on to find out how a barn find beats a restoration, and why Walker’s wife spent four days watering a car.
“It’s especially amazing that a muscular muscle car would turn up in a lady’s garage in Bristol,” said a bemused onlooker. The ’68 Firebird, a 5.7-litre V8 with under 84,000 miles, is heading to auction with its one-owner story intact. Meanwhile, muscle car mania is revving up elsewhere: million-dollar beauties strut their stuff at car shows, Kumho V8s roar into the Muscle Car Masters, and a camouflaged 2017 Camaro ZL1 sneaks around in stealth mode. Who knew muscle could be so charmingly mysterious?
The Camaro was never supposed to last fifty years — it was a rushed response to the Mustang, built on borrowed time and a hastily developed platform. Instead it became one of the longest-running nameplates in American performance history, surviving a cancellation and multiple redesigns along the way. Here’s how a car built to catch up ended up outlasting most of its rivals.
One of these two Chevrolets could be ordered by nearly anyone with the cash; the other required knowing about a hidden engine code most dealers had never heard of. Both hid more horsepower than their factory ratings admitted to. Here’s how a mass-produced 450-horsepower Chevelle and a nearly unobtainable 69-unit Camaro both earned a permanent place in muscle car history.
The Ford Torino name gets tossed around a lot when someone dreams up a modern revival, but the original earned its stripes the hard way. In 1970, wearing a Cobra badge and packing a 429 Super Cobra Jet under the hood, it beat the field to take home Motor Trend’s Car of the Year – while quietly running mid-13-second quarter miles that surprised drag strip regulars. NASCAR success, a snake on the fender, and an engine option most buyers never even ordered: that’s the real story behind the badge. Any 2017 revival had a lot to live up to.
Project Cool Blue’s ’65 Coronet hides an 825-horsepower Ray Barton Hemi under a deliberately unremarkable exterior, but the trickiest part of staying invisible isn’t the engine, it’s feeding it fuel without giving anything away. The team turned to a fuel system originally built to solve the same problem in modern Corvettes, adapted to fit inside a decades-old stock gas tank. No visible fuel cell, no whining pump, no giveaway hanging underneath. Read on to find out how a shallow foam baffle keeps an 800-horsepower secret completely silent.