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Chevrolet needed a name for its answer to the Mustang, and when a reporter finally asked what it meant, the general manager did not consult a dictionary. He described a small, vicious animal that eats Mustangs, and car people have been repeating it ever since. The real story involves two thousand rejected words, a French term that does not quite exist, and a codename that got thrown away.
A turquoise 1964 Chevrolet Biscayne turned heads at a Bedford Park, Illinois car show, but the story behind it is what kept viewers watching. Owner Alex Levesque runs the Automotive Mentor Group, a restoration shop that also works to give former gang members a real second chance. One viewer’s own $150 Biscayne story from 1974 says everything about how far this car has come. Watch the full segment to see it.
From the outside it reads as a pearl orange Plymouth Cuda with a Hemi under the shaker, which is already a serious thing to own. Look through the driver’s window and the story changes completely, because the steering wheel is on the wrong side. Schwartz Performance built this E-body for an owner in India, and moving the wheel turned out to be the smallest part of the job. Read on to find out what had to move with it.
When Muscle Car Fan’s following crossed half a million, the site marked it with a short trailer instead of a victory lap, a quiet nod to years of owner interviews and feature stories rather than one viral moment. Reaching that scale in a niche this specific says something about how far muscle car nostalgia actually reaches beyond the collector crowd. The bigger story is not the number itself, it is what kept that many people showing up. Watch the trailer and see how it is framed.
Ben calls his 1976 Ford Cortina “overkill,” and it’s hard to argue: a twin-turbo, supercharged Ford Cleveland V8 stuffed into a compact Australian sedan, built specifically to chase his own personal best burnout time at Summernats. A mechanical issue cut the record attempt short, but not before the car vaporized its tires and earned genuine respect from a crowd that expected a lot less from a Cortina.
Troy Hawkes fires up his numbers-matching 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona for a rev and a quick burnout, but the real story is what that towering wing and 18-inch nose cone were built to solve: a NASCAR aero war that pushed Chrysler to build only 503 street versions just to legalize the race car. Watch to see the homologation special that helped Dodge become the first manufacturer to top 200 mph in NASCAR competition.
On paper, a Whipple-supercharged Terminator Cobra should have walked away from a manual-transmission 1969 Camaro without much drama. On the track, the Cobra’s driver spent half the run fighting to keep the car pointed straight while the old-school Camaro refused to fall back. Commenters are calling it one of the best “driver’s races” they’ve seen in a long time.
Grid Banter’s cameras catch the Dodge Demon’s first public test run at the 2017 Gator Nationals — footage tied directly to NHRA’s unusual decision to ban the production car from its own sanctioned events. A Dodge rep confirms on camera that it’s a real Demon mule, then declines to discuss specs. Even a Corvette Z06 owner in the comments admits Dodge deserves credit for building something this extreme.
A pearl white Firebird GTA with a Buick-derived V6 and two turbochargers strapped to it is not the combination anyone expects to see running quarter-mile times that embarrass big-blocks. But Buick spent the 1980s proving that a boosted six could humiliate V8s, and this Firebird is what happens when someone takes that lesson to its logical extreme. Here is why the engine everyone dismissed keeps winning.
A twin-turbo Mustang, a supercharged Hellcat, a BMW M6, and — improbably — a four-door Cadillac CTS-V all lined up on the same stretch of Mexican freeway for a night of unsanctioned street racing. Nearly two million viewers have tuned in since, and the comment section still can’t agree on which car actually deserved bragging rights. Watch to see which one earns the loudest reaction.
Chrysler’s second generation Hemi arrived in 1964 as a race engine barely disguised as a production part, and its nickname came honestly. The 426 stood 10.72 inches at the deck, spread its bores 4.80 inches apart, and needed an engine bay most cars did not have. Roughly 11,000 street versions were ever built. Read on for how NASCAR banned it, why the valvetrain made it so expensive, and what made it the default choice for nitro racing.
Plymouth gave the ‘Cuda its quad-headlight face and fender gills for exactly one model year, and that year happened to be the one where insurance companies and emissions rules finally caught up with the muscle car business. Order it with three two-barrel carburetors on a 440 and you were buying the last of something. Barely two hundred and fifty people did. Read on for why 1971 closed the book.
A restored red 1972 Plymouth Barracuda looks the part, but 1972 was the year Chrysler’s biggest engines vanished from the order sheet entirely. The Hemi and the 440 Six-Pack were both gone, leaving the 340 as the top option at 240 horsepower under the new SAE net standard. Production fell hard, and the heavy-duty hardware disappeared alongside the engines. Read on to find out what changed and why the last E-bodies still matter.
Bobby Alloway brought this 1965 Buick Riviera to the 2016 SEMA Show looking almost stock from twenty feet away, which is exactly the trick. Underneath the unchanged sheet metal sits a Chevrolet 502 big block, a Tremec five-speed, an Art Morrison front clip, and Billet Specialties wheels measuring 19 inches front and 22 rear. The original Nailhead V8 is nowhere to be found. Read on to find out what makes this build work.
The AC Cobra Mark III started life as a British roadster body flown to Los Angeles with an empty engine bay, and ended up as the car that forced a national government to invent a speed limit. Along the way it collected a Jaguar differential, an MGB steering rack, a Volkswagen steering column, and a Ford 427 side-oiler that made 425 horsepower. One example later sold for $5.5 million. Read on for how a hurried eleventh-hour decision produced all of it.