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A Minnesota collector has spent decades keeping his 1965 Rambler Marlin on the road, and it still stops traffic at every show he brings it to. Before the Dodge Charger existed, this AMC fastback quietly set the template for the American personal muscle coupe. Here’s why almost nobody remembers it did it first.
Brothers Mike and Jim Ring, already known for a 4,700-hour build on a 1969 Dodge Charger, turned their attention to AMC’s most overlooked muscle car — a 1972 AMX Javelin once dismissed by Mustang and Camaro owners as an ‘ugly duckling.’ A year and roughly half a million dollars later, Ridiculous Rides documents exactly what that obsessive effort bought. Watch to see whether the Javelin finally earns the respect it never got the first time around.
When Mikey V’s father, a former American Motors employee, asked his son to choose between a Hornet and a Javelin, the answer became this 1972 AMC Javelin SST, now built to make an estimated 900 horsepower and still driven as a daily commuter whenever weather allows. At Wisconsin’s World of Wheels show, viewers praised the build for keeping genuine AMC power instead of a common big-block swap. See how a father’s question turned into one of AMC’s wildest daily drivers.
Long before YouTube reviewers existed, TV host Bud Lindemann was putting cars through genuinely aggressive road tests — and this 1971 AMC Javelin SST got one of his more pointed reviews, directly comparing its styling to the Corvette before insisting “the Javelin is a handler.” Between AMC’s shared-block engine strategy and its little-known Group 19 racing parts program, this vintage clip explains why AMC loyalists remain some of the most devoted voices in muscle car culture. Watch the full vintage test.
Mikey V has owned his 1972 AMC Javelin SST since it left the factory, the result of a question his American Motors employee father once asked him: Hornet or Javelin? Lou Costabile found the car, now packing roughly 900 horsepower, at Wisconsin’s World of Wheels show. Weather permitting, it is still his daily driver. Watch to see what happens when a car built for grocery runs gets pushed this far past stock.
This vintage road test puts the 1969 AMC AMX through its paces exactly as period buyers would have seen it — no nostalgia, no hindsight, just a genuine two-seater posting a 6.3-second 0-60 time that still holds up today. Viewers can’t decide what stands out more: the numbers, the styling, or the unmistakably late-1960s marketing. Watch the full period test.
AMC built exactly one two-seat steel-bodied American sports car during the muscle car era, and it wasn’t trying to be subtle about its ambitions. The AMX set 106 world speed and endurance records before its public debut, then backed that up with genuine cornering ability alongside straight-line speed. Read on to see how a three-year model run earned back-to-back engineering awards from the Society of Automotive Engineers.