 |
When Ferrari passed on refurbishing the underpowered Sunbeam Alpine’s engine, Rootes Motors turned to Carroll Shelby, fresh off building the AC Cobra. What followed was a secretly funded Ford V8 swap, a surprised company owner, and an order so large it was the biggest Ford had ever received from another automaker. Read on to find out how the Sunbeam Tiger came together in eight months.
A factory 427-cubic-inch V8 wasn’t a common option on a 1967 Impala SS, which makes David Fritzsche’s Elkhart Blue example — his since 2007 — a genuinely rare find at a Chicago car show. The bench-seat detail alone surprised the interviewer. Then David gave the 427 a rev, and the comment section stopped talking about specs entirely, focused only on how it sounded.
The first-generation Chevelle produced one of the rarest and most faked muscle cars General Motors ever built. Only 201 Z-16 Malibu SS 396 cars were assembled in 1965, roughly 75 are believed to survive, and their six-figure values have created an entire cottage industry of counterfeits. The reason the fakes fall apart has nothing to do with paperwork. Read on for how to read a real one, and what made the 1966 SS 396 different.
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.
Ford built 472,121 Mustangs for 1967, and fewer than five hundred of them carried the K-code Hi-Po 289 with its solid lifters, 10.5:1 compression, and 271 horsepower at 6,000 rpm. This Wimbledon White convertible claims to be one, wearing a GT Equipment Group that was real hardware rather than a stripe kit. Telling a genuine car from a convincing tribute comes down to one character in the VIN. Read on for what to look for.
Aston Martin’s DBS doesn’t look like a typical Aston — its squared grille and fastback tail borrowed more from American muscle car design than English tradition. That unusual shape hid a V8 upgrade in 1969 that briefly made it the fastest four-seat production car in the world, and a starring role as James Bond’s car the same year. Here’s how a British grand tourer ended up channeling Detroit.
The Chevy 350 arrived in 1967 as a Camaro-only option making 300 horsepower and left the 1980 Corvette rated at 190. Nothing about the engine got fundamentally worse in those thirteen years, but almost everything around it changed. This installment traces the L-48 through the Camaro, Nova, Impala and Corvette, decodes the block and head casting numbers worth knowing, and explains the VIN character that proves a 1972 Nova SS. Read on for the details.
The 1969 Camaro SS’s official order sheet topped out at a 375-horsepower 396, but a separate, little-known path let buyers get a factory 427 anyway — through Chevrolet’s COPO ordering system or through tuner dealers like Yenko and Baldwin-Motion. The rarest of those, the aluminum-block COPO ZL1, was built in tiny numbers and now ranks among the most valuable Camaros in existence. It’s proof the fastest ’69 SS wasn’t always the one on the brochure.
Studebaker’s story starts in 1852 as a South Bend, Indiana blacksmith shop that grew into the world’s largest builder of horse-drawn wagons, decades before it ever touched a car. When it finally entered the automobile business in 1902, its first vehicle ran on electricity, not gasoline. By 1966 the automaker was gone, folded a year later into an industrial conglomerate with no connection to cars at all.
Chevrolet spent years developing the Camaro under a code name that had nothing to do with cats and everything to do with secrecy, then refused to explain what the production name actually meant. The answer a company spokesman finally gave the press has been quoted ever since. Across thirty-five years and four generations the car went from a 427 big block to a four-cylinder to an all-aluminum 305-horsepower LS1. Read on for how it got there.
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.
A 1967 Chevrolet Impala sat untouched for thirty-three years before anyone dared turn the key again — and when it finally caught, it sounded less like a car and more like something waking up angry. Viewers have compared the ragged idle to everything from a sputtering biplane to Stephen King’s Christine clearing her throat. Watch to hear exactly what three decades of silence sounds like breaking.
A random online post about a car sitting in someone’s barn led The Auto Archaeologist to a 1967 Mercury Comet Caliente most muscle car fans have never heard of, let alone seen. This particular example carries the R-code designation, meaning a factory 427 with dual four-barrels and a four-speed manual, verified in an original Hot Rod magazine feature. Even dedicated Mercury enthusiasts often assume this configuration is more legend than reality. Watch to see what a genuine, forgotten piece of Mercury muscle car history looks like today.
A 1967 Chevy C10 wasn’t built to be fast – Chevrolet’s second-generation Action Line trucks topped out around 325 horsepower from the factory. That hasn’t stopped builders from transforming these honest work trucks into genuine muscle car rivals, some packing twin-turbo LS power well past 1,000 horsepower under bodywork nobody would suspect. Here’s how a humble half-ton became one of the truck world’s favorite muscle car disguises.
The 1966 Ford F-100 was the last of its kind, replaced by an all-new truck the following year, which makes it an odd starting point for a show-quality street build and also exactly why it works. Underneath is Ford’s Twin I-Beam front suspension in only its second season. Inside is a custom cabin that has nothing to do with hauling lumber. Read on to find out what makes this generation of F-100 worth the money.