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A black 1973 Trans Am with its shaker hood scoop open looks the part from any angle — but underneath could be one of two completely different engines, separated by a rarity gap of roughly nineteen to one. Pontiac’s Special Projects group built the SD-455 as a genuine heavy-duty answer to tightening emissions rules, and only 252 Trans Ams ever got it. Read on to find out what separated Pontiac’s last real muscle car engine from the ordinary 455.
Registration opened for the 2017 Optima Search for the Ultimate Street Car with Danny Popp, an ASE Master Technician and GM-Certified Corvette specialist, defending three straight championships. The series scores road course, autocross, braking, acceleration, and design judging together, and Popp made history in 2011 as the first winner in a modern car, a 2006 Corvette Z06. Read on to find out what it takes to keep beating a field of classic and late-model muscle across every discipline.
Dodge built the 1969 Super Bee to be the cheap muscle car — stripped trim, no chrome flourishes, and a sticker price built to undercut the competition. But buried in the order form was an engine option serious enough to worry cars costing thousands more, one that only 1,907 buyers ever found. From the base 383 Magnum to the ultra-rare Hemi, the Super Bee proved a bargain car could still hide a genuinely dangerous engine bay. Read on to see what separated the budget Super Bees from the legends.
The 2016 Ridler Award went to a 1939 Oldsmobile convertible called Olds Cool, built for a Texas couple by a small shop that spent years on a car most builders would never have chosen. The Model 60 was Oldsmobile’s entry-level six that year, not a glamour car, and complete examples are close to unfindable today. Here is what the Ridler actually demands, why the donor car made the build harder, and what separates a Great 8 finalist from the one that wins.
Detroit Speed dropped a blown modern HEMI into a 1969 Charger and built out 830 wheel horsepower, a number so high that TheSmokingTire had to publicly correct its own original estimate. Viewers immediately compared it to Roadkill’s notorious General Mayhem, just cleaned up and sent to finishing school. Watch the full build.
Ask anyone shopping for a real muscle car in 2026 what single option adds the most to a sale price, and automatic is never the answer. It’s the stick. An animated breakdown of exactly what happens inside a standard transmission, dog clutches, synchronizer rings, and all, explains why manual gearboxes earned that name in the first place and why a worn synchronizer eventually starts grinding under load. Watch to see the mechanism collectors pay a premium for laid out in full.
Ford stopped building its flathead V8 in 1953, and it still hasn’t gotten the memo that it’s supposed to be forgotten. Decades later, flathead-powered cars were still setting land-speed records at 300 mph, built by hot rodders working the same engine that once powered ordinary Ford sedans. Read on to find out how a design this old became the engine that built the entire hot rod movement.
Tim Allen’s 1956 Ford pickup hides a genuine Chrysler Hemi under the hood, a build the shop dialed in across sixty-plus dyno pulls until it settled at 640 horsepower and 670 pound-feet of torque. It is a cross-brand swap that breaks every rule of Ford-versus-Mopar loyalty and turns a basic work truck into something that can embarrass purpose-built muscle cars. Watch to see exactly how this unlikely combination came together.
Studebaker rarely shows up in muscle car conversations, but in 1955 the independent automaker’s flagship President Coupe was a legitimate rival to the Ford Thunderbird and Chrysler 300, armed with a 259-cubic-inch V8, a four-barrel carburetor, and a driver-focused three-speed manual with overdrive. A strong public reaction to a handful of Speedster show cars even pushed Studebaker into limited mid-year production. See what made this overlooked flagship worth a second look.
In 1968, an Oldsmobile engineer asked the Hurst team to help build something that should not have existed: a 442 with the Toronado’s front-wheel-drive powertrain packed into its nose. Exactly one was completed, and it survived in one owner’s hands for 42 years before Fred Mandrick acquired it in 2012. Read on to find out why Oldsmobile bothered building a front-drive muscle car nobody was ever supposed to buy.
The same owner puts his Dodge Demon and Hellcat on the same dyno, on the same day, to finally settle which supercharged Hemi actually makes more power at the wheels. The numbers confirm Dodge’s engineering gap between the two cars, and the video hints there’s still more locked away in the Demon’s factory race-fuel mode. Demonology’s channel built its following on exactly this kind of head-to-head test.
An Army aircraft mechanic stationed overseas bought this rust-free 1971 Dodge Charger sight-unseen, with plans to drop in a 572-cubic-inch Hemi built for over 800 horsepower. Before the media blasting and undercoating are even finished, one question remains unresolved: stick with factory-correct yellow, or go full restomod with flat black and bold stripes? The build taps into a growing wave of big-block Charger restomods that trade numbers-matching originality for modern muscle and serious street presence.
At Street Car Takeover OKC, a Procharged C7 Corvette running just 7 psi of boost — around 570 whp on a manual transmission — takes down a Nitrous Outlet Viper running without spray, all over a sandwich bet. The driver, known in the comments as Miss Stangkilr, wasn’t who the crowd expected to win. Watch the full Roll Race and see the bet get settled.
This twin-turbo Coyote Mustang rolled onto the dyno at Dynoedge running a modified Hellion turbo kit, reworked specifically to shorten intercooler piping and cut turbo lag, and posted a run that pushed toward nearly 1,400 horsepower at 26 psi of boost. Commenters zeroed in on the exhaust note as much as the numbers, calling it one of the best-sounding Coyotes they’d heard on a dyno. Watch the full pull to see exactly what a shortened-piping Hellion setup can do to a factory 5.0.
This 1970 Plymouth Duster 340 H Code comes with original floors, an original color combination, and power steering and brakes — the kind of honestly preserved small-block Mopar that real enthusiasts could actually afford to drive daily. One viewer already spotted something unusual about the Rallye dash. See what caught their eye.