 |
In 1976, a heavily built 1967 Plymouth Barracuda Formula S with a 383 big block got its doors blown off on Gratiot Avenue — by a full-size Pontiac most street racers wouldn’t have recognized. The culprit was a rare 1966 Pontiac 2+2 running a 421 tri-power engine rated at 376 horsepower, a model Pontiac once marketed as the GTO’s big brother. Read on to see how one of the rarest Pontiacs of the 1960s humbled a genuinely fast Mopar.
The Fab Forums picks up a die grinder and starts reshaping a stock intake manifold’s runners in real time, explaining exactly why port-matching — not just polishing things smooth — is the technique that actually adds power. It’s raw, unscripted shop footage rather than a polished tutorial, showing the kind of decision-making that separates a home porting job that works from one that just looks like it should. Watch the process unfold bit by bit.
Alf’s 1965 Chevy II Nova SS still wears its original California dealer plates, decades after Hovey-Dallas Chevrolet first sold it — only now it’s a familiar sight near Seaview Road outside Adelaide, Australia, following a 2008 import. The car runs its factory 283 V8 and PowerGlide transmission, kept close to stock except for dual Flowmaster mufflers and a fresh set of mags. Read on to see how a documented, three-owner Nova crossed an ocean and stayed true to its roots.
More than 800 cars packed Cobo Center for the 65th annual Detroit Autorama in 2017, one of the most significant gatherings in the hot rod and custom car world. The Ridler Award, reserved for cars debuting for the very first time in public, went to a scratch-built 1933 Ford Roadster running a 427 big block. What else was hiding among 800 cars competing for the hobby’s biggest stage?
A 1960 Chevrolet Impala convertible in Ermine White carries an engine option so rare that one longtime fan estimates only a few hundred were built this way: the 348 Tri-Power, three two-barrel carburetors feeding a car most buyers ordered with a single four-barrel instead. Volo Auto Museum’s Brian Grams walks through this loaded survivor with My Car Story host Lou Costabile, and the story it tells — from Sydney to a car show price tag decades later — says a lot about how these cars are valued today. Watch to see what made this one worth keeping.
In 1916, Willys-Overland was Americas second-largest automaker behind only Ford, and this Model 86 was its answer to what a flagship car could be: a seven-passenger, 45-horsepower luxury tourer loaded with then-modern features. It only lasted one model year. Heres why Overland built it, and why it disappeared just as fast.
Somewhere in America sits a single 1965 Chevelle convertible that Chevrolet built completely differently from every other Malibu on the lot, and for decades most people who saw it had no idea why. Chevy had a new big-block ready to show off and, rather than quietly bolt it into a few cars, engineers built an entire limited package around it. Only 201 were made, and fewer than eighty are believed to survive.
Yenko cars from this era mean one thing to most collectors: a big-block shoehorned into something that had no business being that quick. Then the 1970 Nova wearing Yenko badges broke the pattern completely. Don Yenko had built his entire reputation on 427-powered COPO monsters, and for 1970 he skipped the big-block altogether. The reason had less to do with engineering than with insurance underwriters.
A black 1972 Monte Carlo does not announce itself the way a Chevelle SS does, and that was entirely the point. Chevrolet built this car to compete in the personal luxury coupe boom, not to win stoplight races. Yet a genuine 454 big-block sat on the order sheet that year, listed alongside power windows and a padded vinyl roof, and 1972 turned out to be the final year of the original car’s styling.
Fred already had a reputation for beating cars he had no business beating, including a widely shared win over an EcoBoost Mustang in the half mile. In this video, he brings his Corvette to the Merrill Ice Drags in Wisconsin, where studded tires replace drag radials and horsepower counts for far less than throttle control. The result adds another chapter to an already unlikely winning streak. Watch to see how the Corvette handles a surface with almost no grip at all.
Builder Cook and Evolution Performance took a factory Shelby GT500 and did something counterintuitive — they shrank the engine to 349 cubic inches, sleeved it, and bolted on a single 94mm turbo mounted right in the grille. The result reportedly makes 2,200 horsepower and has run quarter-mile passes as quick as 6.66 seconds at 210 mph, numbers that put it in territory few Mustang-based builds ever reach. This is the story behind The Devil’s Reject. Watch to see the run that earned the name.
By 1973 the Camaro Z28 had lost its solid lifters, its high compression, and its Holley carburetor, and it was rated at 245 net horsepower. It also gained air conditioning availability and kept one of the best chassis of any American car of the era. It was the last Z28 before the 1974 bumper regulations changed the shape for good. Read on for what was really left inside the badge.
Chevrolet spent most of 1964 insisting it did not need a Mustang rival, then spent the next two years building one in a hurry. The 1967 Camaro arrived on an all-new F-body platform with everything from a 140-horsepower six to a 375-horsepower 396, plus a homologation special called the Z/28 that only 602 buyers ever received. Here is what made the first year the one collectors still chase hardest.
1970 was the last model year before a looming federal fuel mandate forced every automaker to detune their engines for good, and Buick used that final window to build one of the most overlooked muscle cars of the era. The GS 455 Stage 1 traded flashy branding for raw torque, putting up numbers that rivaled cars with far bigger reputations. This is the story of how the old man’s brand ended up building a genuine class leader. Watch to see why collectors are still catching up to it.
Plymouth built 108 Hemi ‘Cuda hardtops for 1971 and just eleven convertibles, which is why this specific corner of the Mopar market operates on a completely different scale from everything around it. The car in question has covered 2,010 miles since new and was custom-ordered with the desirable boxes already ticked. Whether that adds up to a seven-figure asking price depends less on rarity than on paperwork. Here is what actually drives the numbers.