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Posts Tagged: American

Fifty-seven horsepower separated the sixth-generation Camaro ZL1 from the Challenger SRT Hellcat, and the Dodge held the bigger number. Hennessey Performance lined them up anyway, and the horsepower column turned out to be the least interesting part of the comparison — because weight, gearing, tire width, and what happens in the first sixty feet decide a drag race long before either car reaches top gear. Read on to find out why 650 horsepower and 707 horsepower end up much closer than the spec sheets suggest.

In 1969, Plymouth paid Warner Bros. for the rights to a cartoon bird, its signature meep-meep horn, and an entire ad campaign built around outrunning a coyote. This commercial captures that gamble at its peak, arriving the same year the Road Runner won Motor Trend Car of the Year over cars that cost far more. It is proof that a genuinely fast car could still afford to be a little ridiculous. Watch the pitch that convinced a generation of buyers.

One of the actual Dodge Chargers used on screen by Dominic Toretto in the original Fast and the Furious now belongs to an Italian collector — and in 2015, he did something most owners of movie-used muscle cars never risk. He ran it down a real quarter-mile at Rivanazzano’s dragstrip in Italy. The pass has racked up nearly six million views since, mostly from people who can’t believe he actually did it.

Everyone associates the Dodge Viper with its brutal V-10 engine, but TFLcar’s Viper Week dig into the car’s origin uncovers a detail that surprises even longtime Mopar fans: the very first Viper concept wasn’t built around a V-10 at all. The name almost went a different direction too. This origin story traces exactly how a stripped-down concept car became one of America’s most uncompromising sports cars.

American police cars didn’t always look the part — before purpose-built pursuit packages existed, departments were just bolting bigger engines into whatever full-size sedan Detroit was selling that year. This rundown traces the path from 1960s Mopar police packages through the Chevrolet Caprice 9C1 to the car most people still picture when they hear ‘squad car’: the Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor. Viewers immediately argued about who got left off the list.

A vintage Dodge Dart with a Chrysler 340 under the hood lines up against a modern C5 Corvette, and the comment section had already decided who wins before the video even loaded. One viewer calls it over before it started; another shares the story of nearly buying a 340 Duster for $1,000 back in 1975. Watch to see if old-school Mopar muscle really does settle the argument.

A routine traffic stop — a driver dusting off his own car while he waits, an officer running a records check — takes a sudden turn when an out-of-control pickup truck crashes into the scene, all caught on dashcam. Viewers have spent years picking apart the driver’s exact reaction in the moment it happens. Watch the footage and see how fast an ordinary roadside wait can turn into something else entirely.

Long before the Hemi, Dodge started as a bicycle-parts patent and a Detroit machine shop making stove parts. Horace and John Dodge built their fortune as Henry Ford’s exclusive parts supplier, sometimes paid in stock instead of cash, before striking out to build cars under their own name in 1914. Their story ends almost as fast as it began.

A 2016 Camaro, Challenger, and Mustang went through the same violent small overlap crash test, and the three modern pony cars did not come out looking anywhere close to equal. A physics teacher breaks down exactly why using a whiteboard, a test track, and the wreckage itself, while the comments argue over whether the test format even reflects real-world driving. Watch to see which of Detroit’s three headline muscle cars held up best.

In 2017, the final model year for the Dodge Viper, driver Dominik Farnbacher took the track-focused ACR-Extreme around the Nurburgring Nordschleife and posted an official lap of 7:03.45, one of the fastest times ever recorded by a car under $400,000. No turbo, no hybrid assist, just a naturally aspirated V10 and a manual gearbox. Watch the full lap that closed out the Viper’s legacy.

This video ranks five of the greatest V8 engines from the golden era of American muscle cars, opening with a key distinction: the 426 Street Hemi’s factory-warrantied 10.25:1 compression versus its race-only cousin. One commenter adds real-world proof of the era’s staying power — a 1970 Mustang Mach I he’s owned since 1977, now making 425 horsepower after a 351 Cleveland rebuild. See which five engines made the list.

Larry F. bought his first car in 1977 for $400: a white 1970 Pontiac GTO that broke his father’s one rule about first cars. He spent two years rebuilding it, drove it for years, and sold it in 1988 for $800 before the muscle car market took off. Years later, walking through an Illinois junkyard with his son, he found out exactly what became of it. Read on to find out what he saw.

POWERNATION’s Detroit Muscle crew takes on Project Ultra Violet, a 1970 Dodge Challenger so rusted it needs sandblasting before the real work can even begin. What follows is a uni-body-to-full-frame conversion built around a Jeff Schwartz G-Machine chassis and a low-deck, all-aluminum Hemi backed by a T56 six-speed. This is not a preserved survivor — it’s a genuine rust-bucket resurrection. Watch to see how far the team pushes it.

Ask ten muscle car fans to name the greatest of all time and you will get eleven answers and one argument. A reader poll settled it once, and the results are stranger than you would expect: the car that finished first was never designed to race, and the car with the highest horsepower rating finished second. Read on for the full countdown and the numbers behind each placing.

The Dodge Challenger name has worn a lot of different cars over the decades — a 426 Hemi-powered muscle icon in 1970, a rebadged Mitsubishi import by 1978, and an 840-horsepower factory drag weapon by 2018. This video runs through all of it back to back, and the comment section reacts to every twist. Watch to see just how far one nameplate traveled.

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