A supercharged Plymouth Duster nicknamed ‘the Ghost’ goes wheel-to-wheel through an entire quarter mile at NEAD’s No Prep Throwdown in Oskaloosa, Iowa, landing a spot in the Small Tire class finals against serious competition. The close finish — and the loyal Mopar crowd cheering it on — turned a regional grassroots race into a clip that’s still inspiring viewers to start their own builds years later. Watch the full pass.
Pontiac built just 697 Firebird Trans Ams for 1969, including only eight convertibles, and the nameplate nearly disappeared before it had a chance to catch on. Two Ram Air engines were offered, but the Ram Air IV went into only 55 cars, all of them coupes. Here is what separated those cars from the rest, and why a legendary third engine never actually reached a customer.
A Ford Explorer launched full-speed into a pond described as snake-infested makes for one of the more chaotic backyard stunts you will see this year, sending both spray and actual snakes flying on impact. Viewers in the comments turned surprisingly technical, debating whether the submerged engine hydrolocked and what a rod-knock repair bill from something like this might look like. It is equal parts slapstick and cautionary tale about what water does to an internal combustion engine. Watch the clip and see the splash for yourself.
RamblinAround takes this 1969 Chevrolet Nova SS out for an honest test drive instead of just walking around it, and with a performance-built 396 big-block, Edelbrock aluminum heads, and a four-speed manual under Cortez Silver paint, there’s plenty to put through its paces. Filmed at Fast Lane Classic Cars in St. Charles, Missouri, the drive shows exactly why this often-overlooked Nova still has a following. Watch to see how a fifty-year-old four-speed muscle car actually feels on the road.
This 1970 Plymouth Road Runner carries a genuine, factory N96 Air Grabber hood, a numbers-matching four-speed, and a VIN buyers can independently trace back through Chrysler’s own build documentation. Vanguard Motor Sales lays out exactly what’s original and what isn’t, down to the date-correct 383 V8 that isn’t numbers-matching, in a listing built for buyers who’ve learned to ask hard questions about classic car sales online. See what a fully documented, one-year-only Road Runner actually looks like up close.
A twenty-year-old bought this 1972 Plymouth Cuda from his parents in 1980 and began restoring it himself, then died in an accident in 1986, leaving the car partially stripped in a barn for the next 25 years. The buyer who eventually finished the job rebuilt its numbers-matching 340 V8 and restored its Hemi Orange paint down to the correct stripe pattern. Vanguard Motor Sales lays out the full story and documentation behind this Cuda’s unusual path back to the road.
Before the Boss 302 or the Mach 1, the biggest engine a Mustang buyer could order was the S-code 390. Rated at roughly 320 horsepower and 427 lb-ft of torque, it turned the 1967 fastback into the serious performance choice a full year before the 428 Cobra Jet arrived. It also wore the exact silhouette that Steve McQueen would make famous. Here is what the GT 390 package actually included.
Builders Davin and Matt spent ten months and shot more than 40,000 photographs to document every stage of rebuilding a Chrysler Hemi FirePower V8 for Hagerty’s Redline Rebuild series, and by their own account, this one was trickier than anything they’d tackled before. The finished time-lapse has drawn over 16 million views, proof that watching an engine come back to life one bolt at a time still has an enormous audience. See exactly what made this particular Hemi rebuild harder than the rest.
This 1923 Ford T-bucket pairs a 350ci small-block V8 with a body style that traces back to a 1950s Hollywood custom car and a TV show that introduced hot rodding to millions of viewers. Find out how a stripped-down Model T became one of the most copied shapes in American car culture, and why 1923 turned out to be the perfect year to build one from.
Plymouth’s second-generation Barracuda gets overshadowed by the E-body cars that followed, but the 1967 Formula S hid something genuinely rare under its Coke-bottle bodywork: a 383-cubic-inch big block squeezed into a compact engine bay. The fit was so tight that power steering was not available at all. Fewer than two thousand buyers took the option, and the compromises tell you exactly how hard it was.
This Competition Yellow 1955 Chevrolet 210 keeps almost nothing it was born with. The original frame, suspension, and inline-six are gone, replaced by a full Art Morrison chassis and a Corvette-derived LS6 aluminum V8. Somehow it still reads unmistakably as a Tri-Five the instant you see it. Read on for what actually changes underneath a build like this, and why the Tri-Five became the default canvas for American restomodding.
The 1967 Chevrolet Impala SS pictured here now runs a 350-cubic-inch V8 and two-speed Powerglide automatic — a later swap, since Chevy didn’t offer the 350 in a full-size car until 1969 — wrapped in Chevy’s freshly redesigned Coke-bottle bodywork. It also carries newly mandated safety features like an energy-absorbing steering column and front shoulder straps, arriving the same year Detroit was forced to start engineering for survival, not just speed. Here’s what made this particular model year such a turning point for the Impala nameplate.
Two years before the Charger body style most people recognize even existed, Dodge released a genuinely different fastback, and this rare, 426 Hemi-powered 1966 example, pulled from the respected Brothers Collection, makes the case for why that first-generation car deserves more credit. V8TV’s Muscle Car Of The Week reaches episode 116 with a car one commenter already calls ‘the most underrated Charger.’ See what made Dodge’s original Charger formula work before the more famous redesign took over.
A bright red 1971 Dodge Challenger is easy to admire and surprisingly hard to read, because 1971 was the year Dodge quietly began dismantling the option sheet that made the car famous. It was the final season for the 426 Hemi, the final season for the R/T badge, and the final season for the convertible. Fewer than a hundred buyers took the biggest engine on offer. Read on for what made this the Challenger’s last complete year.
Chevrolet built the ultimate track-ready C7 Corvette, then deliberately left out the supercharger everyone assumed was the whole point. The 2017 Grand Sport got the Z06’s wide body, brakes, and chassis hardware paired with the Stingray’s naturally aspirated LT1. It sounds like a compromise on paper and turned out to be nothing of the sort. Read on to find out why so many buyers picked it over the more powerful car.
