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Chevrolet’s brand-new 1966 Caprice was built for comfort, not speed — until you check the option sheet. Buried at the top sat the RPO L72, a 425-horsepower 427 big block that Chevrolet installed in just 1,856 full-size cars that year. This particular Caprice carries that rare combination under its luxury trim. It’s an odd, rare pairing that still turns heads wherever it shows up today.
A video titled ‘1977 Dodge Charger R/T’ immediately drew skepticism in its own comment section, with viewers pointing out that Dodge never sold an R/T-badged Charger in the U.S. by 1977 — pointing instead to Chrysler’s Australian, Canadian, or South American operations as the likely real source. The mystery of exactly which regional Mopar plant built this car turns out to be more interesting than a standard restoration walkthrough. Watch the full review and see if you can spot the clues the comments picked up on.
Some builds put two things together that were never supposed to meet. Cleveland Power and Performance took a 1969 Dodge Charger body, a shape recognizable at fifty yards, and married it to a modern supercharged chassis that makes more than twice the horsepower the original engineers ever contemplated. Read on to find out why they swapped the body onto the frame instead of the engine into the car.
The AC Cobra didn’t start out as the V8 icon everyone remembers — Carroll Shelby had to rip out its underpowered straight-six and drop in a Ford V8 to make the legend happen. Only 998 originals were ever built. This modern replica carries the same shape forward in carbon fiber over a tubular steel frame, shedding weight the original engineers never could.
A nineteenth-century French physicist’s glass jar of lead and acid still powers every muscle car on the road today. Gaston Plante’s 1859 lead-acid battery set the template that Delco and Detroit’s big-block engines would come to depend on for reliable starts. Here is how a decades-old invention quietly shaped the cars in this trivia list.
This 1967 Camaro pairs a deceptively restrained exterior and factory houndstooth interior with a 502-horsepower ZZ502 crate engine, filmed in detail at Fast Lane Classic Cars in Missouri. A Borg Warner four-speed and 12-bolt rear handle the power, while front disc brakes and modern tires keep it planted. Commenters can’t stop calling it a dream car. Watch the full walkaround to see what 502 horsepower looks like in a car that doesn’t announce itself.
A 1970 Hemi Cuda, one of just 652 built with the 426 that year, lines up against an even rarer 1967 Hemi Coronet R/T, one of the earliest street-legal Hemi cars Dodge ever sold. Both cars share the same legendary Elephant engine, which means this is less a brand rivalry than a family argument about which chassis and gearing made better use of it. Viewers in the comments have already nicknamed both cars the asphalt elephants. Watch the run and see which body style actually won the argument.
The 1960 Chevrolet El Camino is the model year most people skip past, and it is quietly the most interesting one. It was the last season Chevy built the El Camino on the full-size passenger car platform before dropping the nameplate entirely for three years, and sales had already fallen hard from the debut. A 350 small-block firing up under the hood of one is a giveaway too, because Chevrolet had not built that engine yet.
This Iris Mist 1965 Pontiac GTO carries the 389 Tri-Power, a four-speed, and a rotisserie restoration that leaves nothing to argue about. It also carries an option General Motors was about to take away from every division except Chevrolet’s Corvette, which is exactly why fewer than a third of that year’s GTOs have it. Read on to find out what those three carburetors were really worth.
A manual Shelby GT500 built to roughly 650 horsepower squares off against a factory-rated 707-horsepower Hellcat Charger in this drag strip grudge match, and the comments section is split on who actually deserved the win. Between a missed second-gear shift and near-universal praise for the Hellcat’s supercharger whine, this race turned into a real debate about whether raw power or clean execution matters more at the line. Watch the full race and judge each launch for yourself.
Ten days before the biggest radial tire race of the year, Keith Berry’s Corvette did not have a running engine in it. He sourced a fresh 487-cubic-inch combination, had it installed, and took it to Lights Out 7 without a single shakedown pass, with a $50,000 payday on the line. What happened in the final round against Stevie Jackson has been argued about ever since. Read on to find out how the gamble paid off.
The 2017 Ford Mustang GT did not win its reputation by having the biggest horsepower number in the showroom, because it did not have it. The Camaro SS made more, the Hellcat made far more, and Ford’s own Shelby GT350 made nearly a hundred more. Yet reviewers kept coming back to the 435-horsepower 5.0 as the one that got the whole formula right. Read on to find out what Ford changed around the engine.
Hidden in a Texas garage since 1977, this 1965 Corvair Monza 140 emerged with just 29,000 original miles and all its factory parts still attached. It also happens to represent the exact model year Chevrolet fixed the rear suspension flaw that made the Corvair infamous. Read on to find out what changed underneath, and why 1965 became the best-selling year the nameplate ever had.
Midnight Drags at the 2017 Car Craft Summer Nationals marked the event’s first year at its new home, Beech Bend Raceway Park in Bowling Green, Kentucky. A 42-car field battled it out until Michael Goodman’s 1969 Nova came out on top with an 8.01-second pass at 163 mph. The night was successful enough that organizers brought the event back in 2018 with an expanded two-day format.
This tribute build channels the fastback Mustang known as Eleanor from 2000’s ‘Gone in 60 Seconds,’ finished in the film’s Pepper Gray with GT500-style stripes and a wide-body stance — but the real story is how many different cars have carried that name. From the barely-remembered 1971 Mach 1 of the 1974 original to the Bullitt Mustang comparisons in the comments, this build sits at the center of a decades-long debate among Mustang fans. Watch the full build and see where it lands.