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When Vic Edelbrock Jr. lost his father in 1962, he inherited a ten-employee garage business and no roadmap for keeping it alive. Instead, the 26-year-old spent the next five decades turning Edelbrock into a -million-a-year name synonymous with American hot-rodding, while helping organize the entire performance parts industry through his years leading SEMA. His story is a reminder that some of the biggest names in muscle car culture started as reluctant successors, not industry veterans.
American Motors had no performance reputation, no factory racing program, and no money. So in 1969 it handed a compact Rambler to George Hurst, dropped in a 390, and sold the result for under three thousand dollars. Only 1,512 were built, every single one with a four-speed, and the thing ran quarter miles that embarrassed cars costing twice as much. The SC/Rambler remains the strangest bargain Detroit ever produced.
The Chevy 350 arrived in 1967 as a Camaro-only option making 300 horsepower and left the 1980 Corvette rated at 190. Nothing about the engine got fundamentally worse in those thirteen years, but almost everything around it changed. This installment traces the L-48 through the Camaro, Nova, Impala and Corvette, decodes the block and head casting numbers worth knowing, and explains the VIN character that proves a 1972 Nova SS. Read on for the details.
Ed Wheeldon, known on the drag strip as Fast Eddie, once turned down a $250,000 offer for his 1968 Dodge Dart, a genuine factory Hemi Super Stock he still races at Eddyville Dragway for a $200 appearance fee. Mopar Max Magazine later put him on its cover after the car ran a best pass of 6.501 seconds. Few six-figure Hemi drag cars still see the strip today. Find out why Wheeldon insists on keeping his in the game.
The Ford Falcon XB coupe that became Mad Max’s V8 Interceptor was built from improvised parts, including a worn-out drag car supercharger with its compressor vanes removed just to make it spinnable. Decades later, a mechanic who worked on the build showed up in the comments to explain exactly how close the whole thing came to falling apart during filming — and Australia is still campaigning to bring the car home. Watch to see why this scrappy, homemade build became one of the most beloved movie cars ever built.
Ford built exactly one hundred Fairlane Thunderbolts for 1964, sold every one at a loss, and never built another. Fiberglass panels, plexiglass glass, a 427 High Riser wedged into a mid-size engine bay, and final assembly farmed out to an outside contractor made it one of the most extreme cars ever sold through a dealership. Here is what went into them, what they ran, and why a single season was all they got.
Seven years into a Barracuda build, this owner realized the most dangerous component in the car was not the supercharged 360 under the hood — it was the fifty-year-old wiring harness feeding it. Original insulation cracks, connectors corrode, and grounds fail in ways that stay invisible until something starts smoking. Rewiring is the least glamorous upgrade on any build sheet and the one that matters most. Read on to find out how it’s actually done.
A 1937 Dodge Brothers coupe that covers thousand-mile cruises in air-conditioned comfort, wearing Mopar’s Plum Crazy purple three decades before the color existed, stopping on power discs and running a 350-horsepower Chevrolet small-block through a TH350 into a Ford 9-inch. On paper it is three brands arguing under one all-steel body. In practice it is one of the most sensible ways to build a prewar car you actually intend to drive. Read on to find out why every part of that combination was chosen on purpose.
More than a million buyers drove home in a Chevrolet Impala during 1965 alone – a single-model-year record that’s never been broken. Behind that number sat an engine lineup ranging from a thrifty six-cylinder all the way up to a 425-horsepower 396 Turbo-Jet V8. The photos above, courtesy of Gateway Classic Cars, capture why this generation still turns heads at cruise nights today. Sales records aside, this was a genuinely well-designed car.
A Plum Crazy Challenger Hellcat with a folded front end and barely 9,000 miles on the odometer looks like pure waste. It is not. Wrecked Hellcats are routinely parted rather than crushed, because the supercharged engine, transmission, and driveline are worth more separated than the shell is worth whole. The paint code, oddly, is the part that will be hardest to replace. Here is what happens to a car like this next.
Buick spent most of the 1980s making comfortable sedans and then, in its final year, built a turbocharged six-cylinder that ran a 13.2-second quarter and beat V8s that cost far more. The 1987 Grand National and the 547 GNX units that followed it were the last of the line, assembled in part by an outside performance house, and factory rated at a number almost nobody believed. Read on for what separated a WE4 from a GNX, and what a $35 option got you.
One of the actual Dodge Chargers used on screen by Dominic Toretto in the original Fast and the Furious now belongs to an Italian collector — and in 2015, he did something most owners of movie-used muscle cars never risk. He ran it down a real quarter-mile at Rivanazzano’s dragstrip in Italy. The pass has racked up nearly six million views since, mostly from people who can’t believe he actually did it.
The 2012 Camaro ZL1 brings 580 supercharged horsepower to the line. The Boss 302 counters with 444 naturally aspirated ones. On paper it should be over before it starts, and yet quarter-mile results from the era put these two within a couple of tenths of each other. Weight, gearing, and two completely different engineering briefs explain why, and why the argument still comes up two decades on.
A heavily built 2017 Camaro ZL1 — upper pulley, E85, methanol, custom headers — lined up against a Dodge Demon running nothing but pump gas and the factory tune. On paper, the built car had every advantage. Dodge’s from-the-factory drag weapon had other plans. The race has kept circulating for years, and the comment section still can’t agree on who really should have won. See how the numbers stack up.
A growing number of Camaro builders have decided the ceiling on a usable street car sits around 400 horsepower, not four figures. The Pro Daily approach borrows suspension and brake thinking from pro touring, keeps the air conditioning and reliability of a real driver, and puts the money into everything except peak output. The result routinely out-drives cars with twice the power. Here is the reasoning behind it.