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The 2017 New York International Auto Show brought plenty of new SUVs and market debuts, but one reveal dominated every conversation on the floor: a supercharged Dodge Challenger with Vin Diesel doing the honors on stage. Weeks later, the NHRA’s own governing body would ban the car from competing in its own sport. Read on to find out what Dodge built, and why an entire sanctioning body decided it could not be trusted on the track.
Oldsmobile built its single best muscle car in 1970, and the 442 W-30 has never been matched by anything the brand made afterward. Between an owner still driving his thirty years later and a family’s own Hurst-shifted Holiday Coupe, the stories behind this car go well beyond a spec sheet. Watch to see exactly what earned the 442 W-30 its “never bested” reputation.
A turbocharged Honda Civic showed up to a muscle car drag night outgunned on paper — quarter the displacement, front-wheel drive, and a budget nowhere near the big-inch V8s in the other lane, including a well-known red Chevy Nova. It didn’t win most of its runs. That’s exactly why muscle car fans in the comments gave it credit anyway. Watch to see how close the timing slips actually were.
This 1971 Dodge Charger is a first twice over and a last once: the first Hemi Charger of a brand-new body style, and the final year the 426 Hemi was ever offered in one. It was a factory pilot car that was never supposed to be sold at all, yet it escaped and went out the door through one of the most famous Mopar dealerships in America. Read on to find out how small the 1971 Hemi Charger production number really was.
Nelson Bandy spent years trying to buy a 1968 Shelby GT500KR convertible from the young couple who owned it in Lobelville, Tennessee, before finally closing the deal in the summer of 1978. He has driven it so rarely since that it spent the last 30 years hidden inside a pair of storage containers. Read on to find out what makes this one of just 318 GT500KR convertibles built, and why Bandy still cannot decide whether to restore it or just get it running as-is.
By 1951, Cadillac’s Series 62 wasn’t just popular — it accounted for nearly three-quarters of everything the brand sold that year. A dependable new overhead-valve V8 and a lineup of trim levels ranging from a plain sedan to the chrome-heavy Coupe de Ville gave postwar buyers a reason to finally trust Cadillac’s V8 over the flathead engines that came before it.
A big-tire Firebird gets out of the groove mid-run in this drag racing crash, and the car underneath the wreck has real history: viewers identified it as an ex-Bruce Allen NHRA Pro Stock car. The driver climbed out uninjured, but the footage doubles as a lesson in exactly how fast grip can disappear at speed. See what happens when a purpose-built racer loses the line.
Long before Chrysler, Ford, and Mercury were trading horsepower figures in the muscle car wars, they were fighting over compact cars, and this rare Mopar training film pits the Valiant directly against the Ford Falcon and Mercury Comet. Made for dealership staff rather than the buying public, it’s a rawer look at how manufacturers actually sized up the competition. Watch to see the unglamorous platform war that quietly set up everything that came after it.
A single fuel-injection option on the 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air made exactly one horsepower per cubic inch, a first for General Motors, and it turned a mild-mannered family sedan into something NASCAR banned outright after it dominated early in the season. Read on to find out how a $500 option box created the car enthusiasts still call the Black Widow.
Before 1966, Chevrolet’s car-truck hybrid had never been offered with a true big-block V8 — buyers who wanted real performance had to look elsewhere. Adding the 396 changed that overnight, giving the El Camino a genuine muscle car engine option and helping push production past 35,000 units for the first time in the model’s history.
This 1970 Plymouth ‘Cuda AAR in EB5 Blue wears the signature strobe stripe and free-breathing 340 Six Pack that Plymouth built specifically to homologate the car for SCCA Trans-Am racing. Genuine AAR ‘Cudas carry a distinct VIN sequence that separates them from tribute cars wearing the same graphics, and this one checks out. Restored and offered through V8 Speed & Resto Shop, it’s a reminder that some of the era’s best-looking muscle cars started life as racing paperwork. Watch to see what a homologation special looks like done right.
As insurance surcharges and emissions rules were strangling the muscle car era, Pontiac quietly built one final genuine performance engine: the SD-455. Hand-assembled with race-grade internals and installed in a Firebird lineup that had nearly been canceled, fewer than 300 examples were built for 1973. Read on to find out why enthusiasts still consider it Pontiac’s best-kept secret.
This 1970 Pontiac GTO isn’t a real Judge, and the Texas dealership selling it isn’t trying to say otherwise — it’s a genuine 242-code GTO wearing a body-up restoration and Judge-tribute styling, priced at $33,900. Under the hood is a correctly dressed 400 with HO heads, backed by Baer disc brakes and Hotchkis suspension for a car that can actually stop and turn. At 57,000 original miles, it’s asking buyers to decide what authenticity is really worth.
This numbers-matching 1971 Pontiac GTO H.O. shares its 455 cubic-inch engine and M-22 ‘Rock Crusher’ four-speed with the flashier GTO Judge — but with only 476 H.O.s ever built, it’s arguably the rarer car. The same owner has had it since 1977, and a certified appraiser recently verified its drivetrain against factory PHS documentation before taking it to 100 mph. Watch to find out why the quiet sibling of the Judge might be the smarter buy.
This 1940 Chevrolet Master Deluxe looks period-correct from the outside, right down to the running boards Chevrolet dropped the following year. Pop the hood, though, and the factory 85-horsepower six is long gone, replaced by a fuel-injected 5.7-liter V8 and a modern overdrive automatic — a resto-mod combination that turns a pre-war cruiser into a genuine highway car.