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A friend’s Dodge 440-powered pickup, affectionately nicknamed the smiley truck, gets driven hard enough on a rough road that something underneath finally lets go — live, on camera, with a passenger along for the ride. Viewers have spent years debating exactly what failed, with rusty U-bolts and worn mounting hardware the leading theories. It’s raw, unscripted, and exactly the kind of big-block Mopar mishap owners swap stories about.
Pontiac’s planners expected to sell about 5,000 GTOs for 1964. They sold 32,450, and General Motors dropped its displacement cap on mid-size cars the following year. That is how the muscle car era actually started, and it started as an option package that skirted a corporate rule. A genuinely unrestored early example, still wearing its factory paint and drivetrain, is worth chasing precisely because so few survived intact.
A gasser’s nose-high stance was never about looks. It came from straight-axle front ends built purely to shove weight onto the rear tires at the drag strip, a style NHRA had largely legislated away by the early 1970s. This 1969 Chevelle wears it anyway, trading factory SS composure for something closer to a Tri-Five drag racer’s attitude. That is a deliberate choice, and it says a lot about what the builder wanted.
WYCO Racing’s Operation Octane no-prep event turned the pit road at Kansas Speedway into a proving ground for genuinely street-driven cars, no dedicated race builds allowed. A supercharged Mustang Cobra, an Eagle Talon, and even a four-door CTS-V all took their turns on unprepped pavement. Watch to see which daily driver came out on top when the safety net of sticky racing rubber disappeared.
Mathieu Houtreille’s Ermine White 1965 Corvette Stingray has covered plenty of back roads outside Luxembourg, but it is the story behind the wheel, passed down from his father Jean-Luc at car shows decades ago, that turned this Petrolicious film into one of its most shared. One viewer says it convinced them to buy their first sports car. Watch to hear why.
Each November, automotive archeologist Ryan Brutt assembles roughly 25 to 30 of the rarest unrestored muscle cars in the country for the Barn Finds & Hidden Gems display at MCACN. The 2016 lineup included a NASCAR homologation Charger 500, a factory GTO funny car, and a turbocharged 1962 Oldsmobile Jetfire. What sets the section apart isn’t just rarity, it’s the documented story behind every single survivor.
Steam power was a genuine rival to internal combustion in the earliest days of the automobile, and Leon Serpollet’s flash boiler was central to that fight. His design generated usable steam almost instantly instead of requiring a long warm-up, and in 1902 it helped him set a 75 mph land speed record. His death in 1907 left flash-boiler technology as one of the automobile’s more fascinating dead ends.
International Dyno Authority walks a rough-idling 1969 Camaro Z28 through a full carburetor tuning session, chasing a damaged choke plate, float adjustments, and jetting changes one dyno pass at a time. The result: a 20 percent horsepower gain and 12 percent torque gain, entirely from tuning — no new parts required. It’s a clear, step-by-step reminder of how much power a poorly adjusted carburetor can quietly hide.
The Plymouth Superbird’s nose cone and towering wing were not styling decisions. They were the price of admission to NASCAR’s superspeedways in 1970, and the rulebook forced Plymouth to build roughly 1,935 street cars nobody had asked for. Only about 135 left with the 426 Hemi. NASCAR then legislated the aero cars out of existence after a single season. Here is how one loophole produced the most recognizable Mopar ever built.
This 1936 Chevrolet pickup started life with a modest inline-six and three-speed manual, part of a lineup that introduced hydraulic brakes and an all-steel cab that year. Somewhere along the way it was reborn with a 383 small-block V8 and a Turbo 350 automatic. The swap turns a Depression-era work truck into a driver capable of keeping up with modern traffic.
This Granada Gold 1967 Camaro SS396 convertible, built for V8TV’s 50th-anniversary Camaro coverage, marks the exact mid-year moment Chevrolet finally let the 396 big block into the Camaro — a full two years after it debuted in the Impala SS. Host Kevin Oeste and The Brothers Collection dig into why the engine was late, and viewers’ own decades-old ownership stories fill in the rest.
Two privately owned, twin-turbo cars claiming over 1,100 horsepower apiece — a Ford GT and a Dodge Viper — line up at a Texas Speed Syndicate private track day, and the result comes down to something neither spec sheet could predict. Years later, this exact clip still gets cited in GT-versus-Viper debates online, by fans on both sides of the argument who each think the footage proves their point.
Mecum’s 2017 Kissimmee auction moved nearly 2,000 cars over ten days for more than $86 million, but the muscle car story wasn’t about factory options, it was about competition history. Vintage drag racers from two significant private collections stole attention from the seven-figure Hemis that had defined the previous year’s sale. The results showed real racing pedigree can outweigh raw rarity at auction.
A 1968 Mustang fastback is already one of the most recognizable shapes Ford ever built, so what does a pro-touring build actually change? Almost everything you cannot see. Modern stroker small-blocks, independent front suspension, four-piston brakes, and a chassis stiff enough to use real tires turn a fifty-year-old body into something that runs with contemporary performance cars. Here is what separates a serious build from a repaint with wheels.
Barrett-Jackson’s 46th Annual Scottsdale Auction rolled a deep run of rare Mopars across the block in January 2017, and one lot in particular had the rest of the docket looking over its shoulder: a 1970 Plymouth Hemi ‘Cuda listed as one of only fourteen built, carrying documented race history and national records. Here is what made that car, and the Mopar run around it, worth paying attention to.