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1958 was the year the Corvette finally turned a profit for GM — 9,168 built, a 47-percent sales jump, quad headlights and a washboard hood, and a 283 small-block offered in five states of tune topping out at a fuel-injected 290 hp. It wasn’t a facelift, it was the year America’s sports car proved it belonged.
The fastback body style gave the first-generation Mustang its most dramatic profile, and pairing it with the GT package in 1966 created one of the most desirable combinations Ford ever offered on the platform. This example carries both. Read on to find out why the fastback GT still commands a premium over its hardtop and convertible siblings nearly six decades later.
Most movie cars end up crushed or locked in a studio vault the second filming wraps. This one didn’t. A flame-spitting 1967 Pontiac GTO convertible, built for a role in XXX: Return of Xander Cage, showed up available to rent through Turo — and underneath the prop flamethrower rig sits a genuine, documented HO-engine GTO from the last year before Tri-Power disappeared. Read on to find out what makes this particular movie car a real piece of muscle car history.
A 1973 comparison test that Australian magazines dreamed up but never actually ran finally happens decades late, pairing Fords Falcon XA GT Hardtop, Chryslers Charger E55, Holdens Monaro 350, and the doomed Leyland Force 7V in one frame. Three of these cars fought it out on Australian roads and racetracks for real; the fourth never got the chance, killed by British Leylands 1974 collapse before a single customer could buy one. Shannons Insurance staged the recreation the industry never managed in period. Which of these four legends finally comes out on top?
Dodge built a real consequence into the Demon’s production line: sell at MSRP and your customer’s car rolls off early with a coveted low serial number, mark it up and you go to the back of the queue. One Florida dealer tested that system anyway, and the story spread fast. Read on to find out whether Dodge’s serial-number leverage actually worked.
This 1972 Pontiac Trans Am wears Cameo White paint, a saddle interior, and a 455 H.O. under the hood — but the real story is how few cars like it Pontiac managed to build at all. A 174-day strike at the Norwood, Ohio plant gutted that year’s production, and only 458 of the 1,286 Trans Ams built came with this car’s four-speed manual. Read on to find out how a labor dispute turned an ordinary model year into one of the rarest in Trans Am history.
This compilation skips the usual Camaro-and-Mustang highlight reel to spotlight muscle cars that never got their due — built entirely around engine sound and on-screen text rather than narration. Cars like the AMC Rebel Machine and Mercury Cyclone Spoiler packed genuinely competitive specs but never had the marketing muscle of their more famous rivals. Decades later, they’re still waiting for recognition.
The Fast Lane Car pits the 707-horsepower Dodge Challenger Hellcat Widebody against the equally 707-horsepower Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk — same supercharged Hemi, two completely different missions. One’s a widened muscle coupe built purely to put power down; the other’s an SUV that can still tow a boat and run an eleven-second quarter mile. Watch to see which one actually wins the buyer’s dilemma.
Long before the 1968 Corvette reached showrooms, GM design chief Bill Mitchell used a one-off 1967 Camaro convertible called the Cherokee to test styling ideas that would define it. Muscle Car Of The Week talks with restorer Charley Hutton about bringing the car back, including bumper and color details subtle enough that even longtime Camaro owners miss them. Watch to see the concept even collectors rarely know exists.
1970 finally gave the Ford Ranchero its own identity — Ranchero or Ranchero GT badges on the glovebox instead of Fairlane or Torino script, plus a pointed grille, hideaway headlights, and coke-bottle styling that left the old body looking dated overnight. Four distinct trims rolled out that year, from the woodgrain Squire to a GT that could be ordered with a 370-horsepower 429 Cobra Jet. Here’s how Ford split its unibody truck-car into four very different personalities for one model year.
Pontiac built over 81,000 GTOs in 1967, but only a fraction of buyers walked out with a genuine 400 cubic inch V8 backed by a real Hurst-shifted 4-speed manual. This blue example carries that enthusiast-spec combination straight from a Gateway Classic showroom floor. It’s a reminder that the car credited with inventing the muscle car format still had levels of buyer commitment baked into the order sheet.
Snowball Bishop’s old Ford coupe dirt-track racer sat behind his barn for decades, its Chrysler 440 V8 silent and its racing days seemingly over. Hagerty’s Redline Rebuild crew took on the full teardown-to-startup rebuild, hitting real delays along the way before finally getting the engine running and the car back on an actual dirt track after a fifty-year hiatus. It’s grassroots racing history, not a garage queen.
This 1960 Buick Invicta convertible still carries its original 401 cubic-inch Nailhead V8, a genuine 325-horsepower engine Buick built for buyers who wanted real performance without admitting they wanted a hot rod. The nickname that followed the Invicta around, “the banker’s hot rod,” captures exactly the contradiction between its respectable badge and what was actually happening under the hood. Read on to find out what made this quietly powerful Buick tick.
Take a genuine 1968 Dodge Coronet, strip off the rear wheels, and bolt on a pair of snowmobile tracks, and you get a machine that shouldn’t work but somehow does. This half-track conversion trades quarter-mile bragging rights for the ability to plow through drifts most trucks wouldn’t attempt, built by a hobbyist working almost entirely from scratch. Half-track conversions have a strange, scattered history in American car culture — finding one wearing a genuine muscle car body is rarer still. Read on to find out what makes this build so unusual.
Judy and Jim Scott’s 1969 Mustang Mach 1 wears a shade of blue Ford almost never offered, and the hours Judy spends polishing every inch of it — from the undercarriage to the interior — show in every panel. Read on to find out where Grabber Blue actually came from, and what separates a genuine show winner from a car that only looks the part.