Ford built over 600,000 Mustangs for 1966, which makes it easy to assume every survivor is interchangeable. A factory four-speed convertible with the 289, the Deluxe Pony interior and styled steel wheels says otherwise, because most convertible buyers took the automatic and skipped the performance boxes. The letter stamped in the engine code changes everything about how one of these drives. Here is how to read a 1966 Mustang properly before you buy one.
Posts Tagged: American
The 1949 Oldsmobile 98 Holiday paired a landmark body style, one of the first hardtop coupes GM ever built, with only 3,006 produced, with an engine that changed the industry outright: the 303-cubic-inch Rocket V-8, the first mass-produced overhead-valve V-8 in America. Together they cut 10-to-60 mph times by 4.6 seconds over the prior year’s car and helped kick off the horsepower race that would define American muscle cars for decades to come.
Jay Leno’s garage holds hundreds of cars, but only a handful made the cut when The Drive asked him to name his American muscle favorites. The list runs from an expected numbers-matching Hemi Challenger to a reworked Oldsmobile Toronado throwing over 1,000 horsepower at its rear wheels — proof that even a career car collector’s favorites can still surprise.
A four-cylinder Mustang sounds like a contradiction, but Ford’s 2.3-liter EcoBoost makes more torque than the V6 it replaced, delivers it 1,600 rpm sooner, and returns 32 mpg on the highway. It also takes weight off the nose and responds to tuning in ways a naturally aspirated engine never could. The compromise is the noise, and it is a real one. Read on for why Ford already tried this once in 1984.
Only 20 examples of the legendary Corvette L88 were ever built for the 1967 model year, and this one is the only survivor finished in its specific factory color. At Barrett-Jackson’s Scottsdale auction, it sold for 3.5 million dollars, a price that reflects genuine racing pedigree as much as raw scarcity. FOX Sports called it simply the ultimate in American collector car. Watch to see the moment the hammer fell.
In 1916, Willys-Overland was Americas second-largest automaker behind only Ford, and this Model 86 was its answer to what a flagship car could be: a seven-passenger, 45-horsepower luxury tourer loaded with then-modern features. It only lasted one model year. Heres why Overland built it, and why it disappeared just as fast.
Long before Ford or Chevrolet dominated American roads, a small Michigan company was already outproducing nearly every rival combined with a simple, curved-dash runabout that most people today have never heard of. Oldsmobile’s early embrace of assembly-line manufacturing and aggressive pricing let it claim a commanding share of the entire U.S. auto market by 1903. Here is how one inexpensive little car built the template every automaker since has followed.
A 1955 Chevrolet convertible custom called Payback takes the body that introduced the small-block V8 to the world and rebuilds it with modern intent. Only 41,292 Bel Air convertibles left the factory that year, and decades of hot rodding have thinned that number considerably. Read on to find out what made 1955 the most consequential year in Chevrolet history and what it takes to earn a name like Payback.
Some cars earn the word badass through decades of backyard engineering rather than a marketing plan, and this hot rod is one of them. Its lineage runs back to the dry lake beds of Muroc and El Mirage, to Ford’s 1932 flathead V8, to Hot Rod Magazine’s 1948 debut and the NHRA’s founding in 1951. Read on to find out what separates a genuinely badass hot rod from a car that only looks the part, and why no factory has ever managed to build one.
Regular Car Reviews heads to Corvettes at Carlisle, the largest single-marque Corvette gathering anywhere, and asks a deceptively simple question: which generation is actually the best Corvette? From the fiberglass-bodied C1 through the freshly launched C7 Stingray, owners from every era make their case with total confidence and zero agreement. Watch to see seven decades of America’s sports car argue with itself in one Pennsylvania parking lot.
Import2Race pits a Toyota Supra against a lineup of American muscle in a straightforward, no-frills drag race that leans directly into one of car culture’s oldest rivalries. It’s the kind of grudge match that made the Fast & Furious franchise a phenomenon in the first place — turbocharged Japanese engineering against big-displacement American torque, settled in a straight line. With close to 300,000 views, this matchup has clearly found an audience that never gets tired of watching the two camps go head to head. Watch to see which side comes out ahead.
This 1973 Ford Mustang Mach 1 sits at an overlooked hinge point in Mustang history – the final year of the original first-generation pony car before Ford downsized into the Mustang II. Watch This Car’s short walkaround doesn’t dig into VIN-level history, so the comments end up doing some of the work instead, including a Polish viewer inviting the channel to see a better-documented Mach 1 near Malbork. It’s a small, quietly significant survivor most muscle car fans skip right past. Watch to see why it shouldn’t be overlooked.
This 2015 Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat runs long-tube headers, a smaller supercharger pulley, a cold air intake, and a fresh dyno tune to push factory output from 707 horsepower to a dyno-verified 730 rear-wheel horsepower. On this run, it reached 190 mph and, according to the driver and a commenter riding alongside on a sport bike, still had more to give before running out of road. One viewer jokes about the fuel economy; nobody argues with the pull. Watch to see how close a bolt-on Hellcat gets to its real ceiling.
Put a Hemi badge, a bowtie, and a galloping pony on the same drag strip and the internet will argue about the results for years. Independent 0-60 testing on the Camaro SS, Mustang GT, and Challenger has produced wildly different spreads depending on trim, tires, and driver. Here’s what the numbers actually show, and what’s really under each hood.
Ford built roughly 100 Fairlane Thunderbolts for 1964 with fiberglass hoods, fenders and doors, Plexiglas windows, no heater or radio, and a trunk-mounted battery, all to get a 427 High Riser into the most favorable Super Stock bracket the rulebook allowed. The 425-horsepower rating on the paperwork fooled nobody in the sport. Gas Ronda won the Winternationals with one, and Ford lost money on every car it delivered. Read on for what separates a real Thunderbolt from a very good tribute.
