 |
Ford built the Boss 302 for exactly one reason, and it had nothing to do with street driving. Handing that same high-revving, solid-lifter engine to a Mercury Cougar looks almost like an afterthought, yet that is what happened once the Eliminator package took over as Mercury’s performance flagship. Only 469 Cougars were built with it. This Competition Gold example is documented as a one-of-one. Read on for how a country-club coupe ended up with a race engine.
A dashcam mounted on a Fayette County road captured a three-car collision that has since been viewed more than 2.75 million times — not for the impact itself, but for what the drivers did in the sixty seconds after. One kept recording. Another crossed traffic to check on the woman who caused the wreck. The internet has spent years arguing about what should have been done differently. Watch to see why so many viewers came away impressed instead of angry.
Chevrolet’s full-size Super Sport went from a genuine performance flagship in 1966 to a nearly unmarked sleeper by 1969, as buyers defected to the Chevelle and Nova and the SS427 option shrank to just a few thousand units a year. Front disc brakes finally arrived in the model’s final season. Read on to find out how to tell a genuine SS427 from a well-built tribute.
This 1968 Dodge Charger from Vanguard Motor Sales isn’t just restored — it’s a complete nut-and-bolt, rotisserie rebuild finished in 2005 with under 1,500 miles driven since. The numbers-matching 383 V8, factory colors, and a handful of quiet original options tell a very specific story about how this car was ordered new. Here’s what actually separates a six-figure classic from an ordinary one.
Mercury built the Cougar to sell refinement, with hidden headlights, a plusher cabin and advertising built around sophistication rather than stripes. Then Ford handed it the 428 Cobra Jet and refinement stopped being the point. Order sheets show fewer than 130 Ram Air Cobra Jet Cougars left the line that year in any body style, and convertibles built to this specification were rarer still. Read on for how a country-club car became one of the era’s hardest finds.
Chevrolet lifted the supercharged LT4 out of the Corvette Z06 and dropped it into a car with a back seat, then let buyers choose between a six-speed manual and a brand-new ten-speed automatic. The result was 650 horsepower, a claimed 198 mph top speed, and a 3.5-second run to 60. The engine gets all the headlines, but the hardware holding it down is the more interesting half of the story.
A 707-horsepower Challenger Hellcat lined up against a Tesla Model S, dropped the hammer, and snapped its own driveshaft before it reached the sixty-foot mark. The race was over before it started, but the failure exposed something more interesting than any timeslip would have. Read on to find out why the car that broke tells you more about drag racing than the car that won.
A photo of classic muscle parked bumper to bumper reignites a debate that never really settles: if the gate swung open and you could drive off in just one, which would it be? The obvious answer isn’t always the smartest one, and the reasons enthusiasts give for their picks reveal a lot more than horsepower preferences.
Ford rushed the original Thunderbird into existence as a direct response to the Chevrolet Corvette, seriously considering names like Apache and P-51 Mustang before settling on a mythical bird at the last minute. The two-seat 1955-56 car outsold the Corvette 23 to 1 and introduced a genuinely inventive hydraulic top-and-trunk system with a few real quirks. Read on to find out what Ford got right, and what still leaked.
Under the hood of this fastback sits an all-aluminum, four-cam V8 that was built to win at Indianapolis, not to sit at a stoplight. It belongs to a family of engines that took three consecutive Indy 500 victories and ended the Offenhauser era before turbocharging brought it back. Getting one to idle in traffic required rethinking almost everything about how it breathes. Read on for what that actually took.
Oldsmobile’s 1949 Rocket 88 paired a genuinely powerful new V8 with a lightweight body, turning a staid brand into a NASCAR contender and inspiring a song some historians credit as the first rock and roll record. Across five model years the Rocket 88 gained the Hydra-Matic automatic, survived a factory fire that forced a surprise Dynaflow substitution, and picked up new options like power steering and air conditioning. Read on to find out how one engine reshaped an entire brand.
This original 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle SS396 commercial captures the car at the exact peak of its production run, right before insurance costs and emissions rules reshaped the entire muscle car segment. Behind the pitch is a genuinely confusing engine-naming quirk and a horsepower range that stretched from daily-drivable to weekend track weapon. See how Chevrolet sold an icon before anyone had officially agreed to call it one.
Sammy Miller’s 1984 run at Santa Pod dragstrip in a car called Vanishing Point covered the quarter mile in 3.58 seconds at 386 miles per hour — and it wasn’t burning gasoline to do it. The car ran on hydrogen peroxide, pressurized air tanks, and a chemical reaction that produced 14,000 pounds of thrust. There’s an even faster desert run buried in the same story that never made the official record books.
At the 2017 World of Wheels show in Rosemont, Illinois, Lou Costabile finds a Lightning Blue Roush Stage 3 Mustang that isn’t owned by a collector at all — it’s a rolling partnership between Roush Performance and Meguiar’s Car Care Products. Driver Spike Anderson explains exactly how that arrangement works and why this six-speed, supercharged Mustang exists in the first place. The story behind the car turns out to be as interesting as the car itself.
In 1970, Plymouth’s marketing team illustrated a Hemi Cuda wrapped in all 25 colors the brand offered that year, beating Ford’s 15-color Mustang palette and Chevy’s 18-color Camaro lineup. The car in the ad was never built. Decades later, one collector’s memory of that image and a numbers-matching Cuda found untouched in a New Orleans warehouse changed that. Read on for why the finished car looks completely different depending on which side you approach from.