 |
A Plymouth Cuda and a Chevy S10 pickup should not belong in the same drag racing conversation, but both of these builds run genuine 10-second quarter miles at Palm Beach International Raceway. One is a muscle car icon pushed well past factory spec, the other is an unglamorous compact truck turned sleeper. Watch two completely different paths to the same performance number collide on the same night.
Only three Caterham R500 EVOs were ever built, and each one cost 42,000 British pounds — around $69,000 — without a heater or any other comfort you might reasonably expect. One of them went out and left a Ferrari Enzo behind. The Enzo cost roughly ten times as much. Read on to find out how a company that started with a Lotus parts license ended up embarrassing Maranello.
Plymouth built the Road Runner on a contrarian idea: strip out the luxury everyone else was adding, keep the price low, and let an enormous engine do the talking. Sales projections were in the low thousands. It sold forty-four thousand in its first year. Read on for the cartoon licensing deal, the horn that cost ten thousand dollars to develop, and the mid-year option package that turned a budget muscle car into a Hemi hunter.
Solo’s white 392 Hemi Dodge Challenger rides on a set of 32 inch Amani floater wheels, the kind of custom build most owners keep spotless and parked well away from trouble. AceWhips.NET caught him doing the opposite, laying into the throttle until the rear tires disappeared in smoke. Between the six figure wheel investment and a 485 horsepower Hemi, the physics alone make this a risky flex. Watch to see how much smoke a stretched 32 inch setup can actually produce.
Automakers build pilot cars to shake down a new model before the assembly line starts, then usually destroy them. That makes any survivor a genuinely strange thing to find in a driveway. This early-build 1970 Chevelle SS396 carries the sort of details that make researchers reach for a flashlight and start checking stampings. Read on to find out what the metal underneath would actually have to prove.
Larry F. bought his first car in 1977 for $400: a white 1970 Pontiac GTO that broke his father’s one rule about first cars. He spent two years rebuilding it, drove it for years, and sold it in 1988 for $800 before the muscle car market took off. Years later, walking through an Illinois junkyard with his son, he found out exactly what became of it. Read on to find out what he saw.
Buick’s turbocharged 3.8 liter V6 should have ended when the Regal went front wheel drive in 1988, but this final episode of OldCarMemories.com’s series tracks its unexpected last stop: a 1989 Pontiac Trans Am. The engine used Pontiac heads instead of Buick’s own and reportedly paced the Indy 500 as a genuinely stock car, a first. Watch to see how a mid size sedan engine ended up the fastest thing on a GM showroom floor.
Pontiac built 6,833 GTO Judges for 1969 and only 108 of them were convertibles. This one is believed to be the last Judge convertible built for the model year, wearing a special-order color and carrying the 366-horsepower Ram Air III 400. The Judge started life as John DeLorean’s plan for a cheap, stripped GTO to fight the Road Runner, and then got optioned into something else entirely. Here is how that happened.
The Ford Falcon Sprint never got a nickname, a movie role, or a bedroom poster, and yet the Mustang almost certainly does not happen without it. For two and a half model years it quietly proved Americans would pay extra for a compact with a V8 under the hood, then disappeared the moment its own successor reached showrooms. Its platform, suspension, and engines all carried straight over. Read on for the compact Ford that wrote the pony car playbook first.
The 1965 Ford Falcon Futura is one of the most consequential cars almost nobody talks about. Ford’s compact outsold expectations by an enormous margin, and the engineering underneath it went on to carry the Mustang, the Fairlane, and a long list of Ford performance cars. In Futura trim with a 289 it was quietly quick. Read on for why clean V8 Futuras have become sneaky collector cars.
A supercharged Camaro ZL1 — reportedly belonging to host Liel Levy’s father — takes on a modified BMW and a $200,000 Bentley in this street-racing matchup. The factory 650-horsepower LT4 V8 makes the outcome closer than the video’s title suggests, and the comments are still arguing about just how close it really was. Watch to see how the numbers play out on the street.
Chevrolet builds 69 COPO Camaros a year, sells every one, and not a single one of them can legally touch a public road. The name traces back to a 1969 paperwork loophole that let dealers order 427-powered Camaros the option book said did not exist, including 69 cars with an all-aluminum ZL1 big-block. Chevy revived the idea at the 2011 SEMA Show and has staged the reveal there almost every fall since. Here is how the trick actually worked.
Two headline Challengers arrived in the same 2017 news cycle, and enthusiasts have been mixing them up ever since. The all-wheel-drive one was the Challenger GT, a Pentastar V6 coupe aimed at snow-belt buyers. The 840-horsepower one was the rear-drive SRT Demon that lifted its front wheels off the pavement and ran 9.65 at 140 mph. Here is what each car actually was, and why Dodge needed both at once.
POWERNATION’s Detroit Muscle crew takes on Project Ultra Violet, a 1970 Dodge Challenger so rusted it needs sandblasting before the real work can even begin. What follows is a uni-body-to-full-frame conversion built around a Jeff Schwartz G-Machine chassis and a low-deck, all-aluminum Hemi backed by a T56 six-speed. This is not a preserved survivor — it’s a genuine rust-bucket resurrection. Watch to see how far the team pushes it.
Most barn finds are interesting for what has gone wrong with them. This 1964 Dodge Polara is interesting for what stayed right: a factory big block and a four-speed still in place after decades in rural Texas. Polaras almost never get the attention Chargers and Coronets do, which is exactly how a car like this hides in plain sight. Read on to find out what Dodge was really building in 1964.