Posts Tagged: 1973
The 1973 Corvette is the only one Chevrolet ever built with a soft, body-colored nose bolted to a hard chrome tail, and that mismatch was not a styling choice at all. A federal bumper rule landed halfway through the car’s life and forced Chevrolet’s hand, setting off a chain of changes that reached far deeper than the front end. Quieter, smoother, and riding on radials for the first time, the ’73 marks the moment America’s sports car started becoming something else entirely. Read on for what that year really changed.
A sixteen-year-old school bus driver in Cleveland County, North Carolina talked his father into a $100 down payment on a yellow 1966 Dodge Charger — the most cash the man had ever handed his son at once. What followed was a factory 383/four-speed muscle car turned into a gas-guzzling street machine, sidelined by the 1973 oil embargo, and left parked outdoors for the better part of four decades. Read on for how one phone call from a friend turned into a lifelong family project.
By 1973, most of Plymouth’s real performance had already been regulated away — except for one engine nobody expected much from. Bud Lindemann puts this Cuda 340 through a full road test, and the stopwatch tells a story that surprised buyers who’d already written off the smog era. Watch to see exactly how quick a detuned Mopar could still be.
The 1973 Pontiac Trans Am Super Duty 455 arrived at the worst possible moment for a big-block muscle car — insurance rates were climbing, emissions rules were tightening, and most of Detroit had already walked away. V8TV’s look at this SD-455 explains why Pontiac built it anyway, and why Car and Driver once called it one of the last true fast cars of its era. Watch to see what’s hiding under that shaker hood.
Dave’s 1973 Ford XA Falcon Superbird — one of around 750 built — hadn’t run since 1988. Twenty-five years of silence later, the engine finally gets its first crank in this video, with a full restoration promised to follow. For a car this rare, every attempt carries real stakes. Watch to see if it fires.
Plymouths fuselage-era Fury, produced from 1969 through 1973, gets its own spotlight here, and the comment section has turned into something like a family reunion. Viewers trade specific memories of mothers Autumn Copper Sport Furys, grandmothers 440-powered two-doors, and drivers ed cars with back seats “like a limousine.” Its proof that not every beloved Mopar had to be built for the dragstrip. Watch the full styling breakdown and see which detail — including that famous hidden headlamp option — sparks your own memory.
A stock street Mustang meets its match against a 1973 Plymouth Roadrunner GTX built and sponsored by Intellitec College, packing a methanol-burning, supercharged 440 good for 1,100 horsepower and a 9.20-second quarter mile at 150 mph. Viewers have spent over a decade arguing in the comments about whether it even counts as a fair race. It does not, and that is exactly the point. Watch the numbers do the talking once the tree drops.
1973 was a pivotal year for the Porsche 914: Porsche introduced a larger, more powerful 2.0-liter engine even as the base 1.7-liter lost horsepower to emissions rules, and a 914 became Formula 1’s first-ever dedicated safety car at a chaotic, rain-soaked Canadian Grand Prix. Here’s the story behind both milestones.
Ford expected the new Mustang to sell 100,000 units in its first year — buyers blew past that mark in under three months. This gallery traces the first-generation Mustang from its record-breaking 1964 debut through the Boss 302 era, with a surprising twist: the launch year wasn’t even the Mustang’s best-selling one. See which model year actually topped the charts.
This 1971 Ford Mustang Sportsroof became Eleanor, the only car in movie history to receive on-screen star billing, thanks to director H.B. Halicki’s dangerously ambitious 1974 chase picture Gone in 60 Seconds. Dozens of cars were destroyed, Halicki broke his own back finishing the shoot, and the result is still studied by stunt coordinators fifty years later. See why this scrappy, low-budget original still outshines its famous modern remake.
Back-to-back fuel crises in 1973 and 1979 forced Pontiac to rethink the Trans-Am from the ground up, and the result was a 1982 redesign built almost entirely around wind tunnel data — roughly 500 pounds lighter, capable of 34 mpg with the four-cylinder engine, and styled with hidden headlights and a frameless rear window. Read on to see how that fuel-crisis compromise eventually turned into the fastest production car in North America.
By 1973, insurance surcharges, emissions rules, and new bumper regulations had already reshaped the muscle car era that once defined Plymouth’s Barracuda. The E-body soldiered on regardless, sharing its platform with the Dodge Challenger. Production numbers from this final full season tell a quieter, less celebrated story than the Hemi-powered years that usually get the attention.
This Model A wearing a flathead V8 is almost certainly a later hot rod swap, not a factory pairing — Ford’s real Model A ran a four-cylinder, and the V8 did not arrive until the 1932 Model 18. That original flathead made just 65 horsepower, yet Ford built over 3 million of them by 1936, launching the era’s most enduring engine-swap tradition.