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Rubber-bumper MGBs like this 1979 car are often assumed to be the last MGBs built, though the real final year was actually 1980. The bumpers added over 100 pounds to meet American crash standards and initially hurt handling that a factory fix later helped restore. Here is what changed under those controversial bumpers, and what did not.
Ford built the 1964-66 Thunderbird to win at the country club, not the drag strip, and for the most part that is exactly what it did. But buried in the order books was an ultra-rare 427 side oiler V8 option that dropped the car’s 0-60 time by two full seconds, and fewer than six are confirmed to survive today. Read on to find out what set this hidden performance variant apart from the luxury cruiser everyone else was buying.
The 1967 Plymouth Belvedere lived a double life — one version chased down traffic violators for the LAPD and starred in Adam-12s pilot episode, while another, ordered with the rare 425 horsepower 426 Hemi option, could out-muscle nearly everything else on the road. Only 720 buyers checked that Hemi box that year, making it one of the most overlooked factory Hemi cars Mopar ever built.
Car #180 is one of only 34 Shelby GT350R competition coupes ever built, and under driver Tommy Hamilton it won International Conference championships in 1967 and five west coast titles in 1968 — more than 40 race wins across two seasons. Decades later, a comment from Hamilton’s own son turned this video’s technical debate about horsepower and dyno numbers into something far more personal. Watch to see why this particular Shelby still means so much to the people who remember it racing.
When Chrysler killed the DeSoto brand, the Dodge Custom 880 got the job of filling that mid-price gap almost overnight — and by 1964, a full body redesign and a genuinely unusual dash-mounted push-button shifter helped it post the best sales year the model would ever see. It is an unsung Mopar that saved a lineup nobody remembers needed saving.
Ford built exactly 57 of these R-code Fairlanes in 1966, not for showroom sales, but to satisfy a NASCAR homologation rule requiring a minimum production run. Every one wore the same white-over-black color combination and hid a 427 side-oiler under a stripped-down interior. Only about 25 are believed to survive. Here is the story behind Ford’s rarest mid-size muscle car.
The 1963 Ford Galaxie 500XL offered buyers a spread of engines topped by an all-new 427-cubic-inch V8, built specifically to exploit NASCAR’s newly raised displacement limit. The rarest version, a dual-carburetor 425-horsepower R-code, saw fewer than 3,900 examples built for the entire model year. That combination of race-bred engineering and genuine scarcity makes surviving R-code Galaxies among the most valuable full-size Fords ever built.
Boosted Bertha is a 1965 Chevrolet C10 wearing a supercharger and a stance that puts the rocker panels within an inch of the pavement, but the reason a build like this works starts with a decision Chevrolet made back in 1963. Underneath the boost sits a coil-sprung chassis that was already better than anything else in the segment, plus a small-block architecture that takes to forced induction easily. Read on for what Chevy actually sold in 1965 and what these trucks bring now.
A single law passed by Congress in 1965, with almost no public debate, set the clock running on the muscle car era’s biggest engines. It didn’t ban horsepower outright — it required something automakers had never had to build before, and gave them until 1968 to figure it out. Here’s how a bill introduced by Senator Edmund Muskie ended up reshaping what Detroit could sell under the hood.
The 1965 Shelby GT350 only exists because SCCA rules demanded a minimum run of street cars before Ford could go racing in B Production. What Carroll Shelby handed back had no rear seat, one paint color, side-exit exhaust, and 306 horsepower from 289 cubic inches. Roughly 562 were built that first year before the formula softened. Read on for what made the first-year cars different from everything that followed.
This 1965 Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu SS convertible rolls out of The Brothers Collection in a deep Madeira Maroon with a four-speed manual and bucket seats — and it has already split opinion among viewers over whether its 327 small-block earns it a true muscle car badge. Featured on V8TV’s Muscle Car of the Week series, this no-frills ragtop raises a question that’s been debated in Chevelle circles for decades. Watch to see which side of the argument you land on.
In 1966, Ford and Carroll Shelby handed roughly a thousand genuine Shelby GT350s to Hertz and let anyone with a license and a credit card rent one by the weekend. The Rent-A-Racer program moved GT350 production from a few hundred cars to 2,378, generated decades of lore about roll bars and race numbers, and produced one of the most collectible Mustang variants ever built. Here is how it actually happened.
Chrysler’s second generation Hemi arrived in 1964 as a race engine barely disguised as a production part, and its nickname came honestly. The 426 stood 10.72 inches at the deck, spread its bores 4.80 inches apart, and needed an engine bay most cars did not have. Roughly 11,000 street versions were ever built. Read on for how NASCAR banned it, why the valvetrain made it so expensive, and what made it the default choice for nitro racing.
This 1969 Dodge Coronet Super Bee carries the rare A12 package, a 463-dollar option that swapped in a 440-cubic-inch V8 wearing three two-barrel carburetors for one strange mid-year run. Only 1,907 were built before Dodge moved on. Stock, these cars ran mid-13-second quarter miles, embarrassing plenty of pricier machinery on the strip.
This 1965 Corvette Sting Ray carries the standard 327 V8 and 4-speed manual, not the ultra-rare fuel-injected version Chevrolet also offered that year for $538. With only 771 fuelie cars built before the option quietly disappeared, most 1965 buyers picked exactly the setup shown here. It turned out to be the smarter choice for reasons Chevrolet is own big-block engine would soon prove.