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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.
Doug Cook and the team at Motion Raceworks skipped the well-worn LS platform for something almost nobody had real data on: GM’s Gen V LT4. With virtually no seat time on the new combination, they walked straight into Hot Rod’s Drag Week 2017 chasing a record, and immediately ran into wiring harness gremlins that nearly derailed the entire attempt. See how a team with no playbook turned a fresh, largely undocumented engine build into record-setting territory.
The 1974 AMC Hornet Sportabout pictured here traded big-block horsepower for a fuel-sipping 258 CID inline six, arriving right as the oil crisis reshaped what American buyers wanted from a car. Built by the smallest of Detroit’s automakers, this wagon paired practicality with just enough flair to avoid feeling like a compromise. Preserved by Gateway Classic Cars, it survives today as a rare, honest example of AMC’s underdog engineering.
Ron Rufo wasn’t shopping for a car when he pulled into a Tinley Park show and happened to park beside a white 1959 Pontiac Bonneville convertible. It won Best of Show that afternoon, he struck up a friendship with the owner, and in 2001 the car became his. It’s also the model year Pontiac widened its track five inches and built an entire brand identity around it. Read on to find out what Wide-Track really changed.
A sticker on every radiator cap warns against opening it hot, and this short clip shows exactly why that warning exists. What happens next has become one of the most-cited cautionary tales in car maintenance videos, with commenters sharing their own scalding near-misses and a five-second test that would have prevented the whole thing. Watch what happens when pressurized coolant meets an unprepared hand.
Pagani built exactly sixteen examples of the 2009 Zonda R, each one wrapping a 750-horsepower AMG-sourced V12 in a chassis made from aircraft-grade aluminum, titanium, and magnesium. At roughly $750 per pound of curb weight, that works out to around $1.8 million for a car Pagani itself says only really belongs on a racetrack. Read on to find out what that kind of extremity actually buys.
This isn’t a replica — it’s a genuine 1970 Dodge Charger R/T with real Fast and Furious production history, now owned by a collector who built his career sourcing and preserving movie cars. Bob Hartwig’s path from pilot to Picture Car Warehouse to running his own MovieMachines collection explains exactly how a car this recognizable ended up in private hands. The launch alone is violent enough to shift a mounted camera. Watch to see why this specific Charger matters to an entire generation of car fans.
The Original Super Chevy Show’s stop in Martin, Michigan runs on a track with real history: US131 Motorsports Park started life as Martin Dragway back in 1962, long before a million renovation turned it into today’s national-touring-ready facility. The event’s entry rule is just as distinctive, any car can compete, even a Mustang, as long as it’s GM-powered. Here’s what made this particular weekend more than just another drag meet.
Gar Robinson beat former Indy Lights champion Rafa Matos in a two-lap shootout to win the Trans Am Muscle Car Challenge TA2 race at Belle Isle in Detroit. The victory closed out a chase his father George had started at the same event back in 1988. Camaros, a Mustang, and a Challenger filled the top four spots, which is exactly the kind of finish TA2 was built to produce.
For two model years America built a pair of homegrown supercars that could embarrass European exotics, and enthusiasts have never agreed on which one did it better. The 2015 Corvette Z06 brought 650 supercharged horsepower and a chassis GM had spent a decade sharpening. The 2016 Viper ACR answered with a naturally aspirated V10 and the most extreme aero package Dodge ever built. Read on to see where each one actually wins.
Buick rarely gets a seat at the muscle car table, but Raceway Park in Englishtown, New Jersey has spent decades proving that’s a mistake — and this second installment of a Buick-versus-muscle-car grudge series, shot trackside in August 2017, is no exception. One commenter’s blunt reminder that “there would be no Chevrolet, GM, or Chrysler” without Buick sums up why this rivalry keeps getting rematches. Watch to see if the Buick backs up the talk.
The 440 badge on this 1964 Dodge has nothing to do with the famous 440-cubic-inch V8, that engine did not exist yet. It was simply the name of a mid-tier full-size trim, sitting between the base 330 and the upscale Polara, standard with a modest 225-cubic-inch slant-six, V8 power only as an option. Paired here with Chrysler’s dependable 727 TorqueFlite automatic. Here’s how Dodge’s confusing 1964 naming actually worked.
Nelson Bandy spent years trying to buy a 1968 Shelby GT500KR convertible from a young married couple in a small Tennessee town, and every time he asked, the answer was no. Then the car disappeared in 1978 and stayed gone for nearly four decades. Its reappearance closed a chapter that started with a chance sighting on a main street. Read on to find out what makes a KR convertible worth a forty-year wait.
A 1969 Dodge Hemi Daytona from the Wellborn Museum Collection just sold for $900,000 at Mecum, and the sale says as much about NASCAR’s aerodynamic wars as it does about horsepower. Fewer than 100 Hemi Daytonas were ever built, and this one carries a documented, numbers-matching pedigree that pushed it into seven-figure territory. Its wing and nose cone exist purely because Chrysler needed to build enough street cars to race the shape. Watch to see what turned a once-unwanted oddity into one of the most valuable Mopars in existence.