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For 1970, Ford promoted Torino to the top of its mid-size lineup and spread it across seventeen different models, from a basic wagon to the 429-only Torino Cobra fastback. Coke-bottle styling, a new competition suspension package, and interior updates reshaped the range from top to bottom. Read on to find out what Motor Trend meant by calling the Cobra “completely different.”
Park a 1969 Ford Torino Cobra next to a Mustang and most people walk right past it — which has always been this car’s biggest advantage. Underneath that forgettable Ford shape sits the same 428 Cobra Jet terrorizing dragstrips out of Mustangs that year, factory-rated at a suspiciously modest 335 horsepower. Read on to find out why this NASCAR-bred sleeper is quietly one of the most underrated muscle Fords ever built.
A twin-turbo C6 Corvette makes its power in a wave rather than a switch, and this build was putting that character to use on both the street and the track. Turbo C6s range from mild 700-horsepower street cars to record-setting builds past 1,300 horsepower, but the real work happens in the brakes, suspension, and cooling that keep the car composed lap after lap. Read on to find out what separates a fast turbo Vette from one that survives a full day at the circuit.
Eleanor, the Mustang from Gone in 60 Seconds, was never a real Shelby — just a heavily modified fastback wearing a body kit designed by Steve Stanford and built by Chip Foose. Only three of the eleven cars built for the film could actually run, and two of those didn’t survive filming. Here’s the real story behind the muscle car that became more famous than most of its human co-stars, and what its legacy says about what people actually mean when they talk about attitude.
Frank Chicherchia owns one of the very few Mopars Chrysler built a genuinely strange factory hood for, and outside its Dodge Super Bee twin, nobody else got one quite like it. Underneath that fiberglass panel sits an engine Chrysler cooked up to poach buyers who wanted more than a 383 but weren’t ready to pay Hemi money. Read on to find out what made this hood different from every other muscle car hood Detroit ever built.
VisioRacer’s countdown of the 15 best-sounding V8 engines has racked up 3.7 million views, and the comments turn into a timestamp-by-timestamp debate over a supercharged Hellcat whine, the Shelby GT350’s flat-plane Voodoo V8, a 6.4 Hemi, and even a surprise Volvo entry. Watch the full list and see where your favorite lands.
Doug Bolton wanted the hottest engine Chevrolet built for 1970, and Roy Price Chevrolet was just blocks from his house in Bountiful, Utah. Decades later, his unrestored 4,300-mile LS6 Chevelle is still on the road rather than tucked away in a trailer. Read on to find out what makes an LS6 the engine every Chevy fan of that era wanted.
Somewhere in the 1980s, the boxy, sharp-edged shapes that defined an entire generation of American cars quietly disappeared, replaced within about a decade by the curves nearly every car still wears today. Vox traces the shift back to a specific Ford sedan, a wind tunnel, and fuel economy rules that made drag coefficient a bottom-line issue for every automaker. The explanation has almost nothing to do with changing taste.
The 1934 Chevrolet Sedan Delivery was never built to turn heads — it was a stripped-down commercial hauler riding on Chevrolet’s Master DA commercial chassis, with a 206 cubic-inch stove bolt six doing all the work. Decades of hard use as a merchant’s delivery van meant most of these were driven into the ground and scrapped, not preserved. Only a handful surface on the collector market today, making surviving examples genuinely rare pre-war finds. Here’s why this unglamorous workhorse deserves a spot in any serious pre-war Chevy collection.
Dressed in conservative, formal styling with no hints of performance, the 1965 Dodge Coronet 500 hid a genuine 330-horsepower 383 V8 under its hood — a true sleeper riding on the same B-body platform that would soon become the fastback Charger. Overshadowed for decades by Chrysler’s Hemi and 440 Six Pack cars, it remains one of the most overlooked ways into real period Mopar performance. Read on to find out what made it tick.
Tim Allen opens up his private garage for GQ’s Car Collectors series, and it’s less a display of exotics than a decades-deep collection of authentic American iron — including a 1965 Shelby Cobra S/C and a 1933 Ford Roadster he built himself during Home Improvement’s run. Watch to see why this collection reflects the man more than the market.
A rotted-out 1970 Dodge Challenger becomes Project Ultra Violet in this POWERNATION Detroit Muscle build. The crew brings in chassis builder Jeff Schwartz for a full-frame conversion, grafts in a low-deck aluminum Hemi and a Tremec six-speed, and finishes it off with metallic purple paint and graphics from builder Chris Ryan. Watch to see how a shell most shops would have scrapped becomes a genuinely modern resto-mod.
A vintage road test puts a 1969 Dodge Charger 500 — Dodge’s NASCAR homologation special, built to fix the standard Charger’s high-speed aerodynamics — through its paces with the 426 Hemi under the hood. Announcer Bud Lindeman narrates in period broadcast style, and the comments are full of viewers’ own Hemi street stories. Watch to hear the line that’s still quoted decades later.
The new products section at the 48th Annual NSRA Street Rod Nationals in Louisville gathered roughly 150 debuts sorted into four price brackets, from under $200 to over $5,000, with names like Dakota Digital, Cooling Components, Cam Guard, and Watsons StreetWorks in the entry tier. It is the one room where builders can handle next year’s parts before anyone else. Read on to find out why serious rodders and muscle car owners alike make it their first stop.
A 1970 Dodge Charger can hide anything from a mild 318 to a snarling 440 Six Pack under that Coke-bottle sheet metal, and the difference shows the instant the throttle opens. Here is what separated the base R/T 440 Magnum from the Six Pack and the Hemi, why the 1970 car was the last and most refined of the second generation, and why collectors still chase the numbers-matching examples. Read on to find out what is really making that exhaust note.