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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.
Mark Lieberman spent three years talking an Ohio owner into selling a Tucker ’48 that had sat since 1982 with barely 8,000 miles on the odometer. Only 51 of these cars were ever built, and 47 are known to survive today, which is part of why one sold for nearly $3 million in 2013. Read on to find out how this particular barn find compares to every other Tucker Lieberman has restored.
Jay Leno owns hundreds of cars, but few tell a story as understated as his 1966 Dodge Coronet, a boxy family coupe hiding one of the most feared engines Detroit ever sold to the public. That small “426 Hemi” fender badge marks the first model year Chrysler offered the Hemi as a genuine street engine rather than a race-only exotic, sold in just three B-body nameplates. Read on to find out why a car this plain-looking still commands serious respect from collectors like Leno.
Restore a Corvette too close to perfect and purists call foul; restore it too loose and you lose the numbers-matching value collectors chase. This decades-old argument over Corvette restoration standards, factory-correct versus “better than Detroit ever made it,” still splits owners today. Read on for both sides of a debate that has no clean answer, and the questions that help you pick your own.
Don Dames’ 1970 Chevrolet Nova wears Green Mist paint and runs a six-cylinder rather than any of the big-block options that usually headline Nova stories. It sat in storage for years and emerged roughly 80 percent original, a survival rate that eludes almost every Nova built for straight-line speed. Read on for why the six was actually the most popular engine that year, and why honest survivors like this one are getting harder to find than restored SS cars.
This widebody 1973 De Tomaso Pantera hides a serious trick under its flared fenders: a Ford GT front end grafted onto an Italian mid-engine body, backed by a 351 Cleveland V8 and a ZF five-speed transaxle. Ford sold the Pantera through Lincoln-Mercury dealers for just a few years before an oil crisis and warranty headaches ended the partnership. Read on to find out what it took to merge two very different Fords into one genuinely double-take build.
A stranger’s dashcam happened to be rolling at exactly the wrong moment for this 1969 Dodge Dart GT, catching a violent rear-end failure loud enough that viewers say they had to rip their headphones off. The comments dug up two competing, detailed theories for what actually broke — and both are worth knowing before modifying your own muscle car’s rear end. Watch to see it happen.
This 1964 Dodge Polara isn’t numbers-matching — and one commenter says that hasn’t stopped it from being “worth every penny” of its roughly $39,000 asking price. Under the hood is a full crossram 426 Max Wedge with dual four-barrels and fender-exit headers, backed by a four-speed and a 4.11-geared Dana 60 built purely for launching hard. A full-size sleeper with a well-preserved original interior, it’s the kind of Mopar that collectors chase for substance over paperwork. Watch the walkaround and hear it run.
In 2017 the rumor mill had a specific target: a 2019 Dodge Barracuda that would replace the aging Challenger with something smaller, lighter and built on Alfa Romeo underpinnings. It never happened. What Dodge actually did with the Challenger over the following six years turned out to be far stranger than the rumor, and the Barracuda name is still sitting unused. Here is where the story came from and how it really ended.
Ford outsold Chevrolet by 10 percent in 1951, and the optional 239 cubic inch flathead V8 under this coupes hood was part of the reason why. That same engine, simple enough for anyone to modify, became the foundation of the postwar hot rod movement and helped define an entire era of American car culture. Here is why builders still chase this engine family decades later.
A 6.0-liter LS truck engine doesn’t become a 6.2 with a few bolt-on parts, and this hands-on build video from Myvintageiron7512 shows exactly why, bore work, machine shop tolerances, and the same architecture GM used to build the LS3 that powers C6 Corvettes and fifth-gen Camaros. One viewer summed up the appeal simply: this is someone who clearly knows the platform inside and out. See what it actually takes to bridge the gap between a budget truck engine and genuine LS3-spec displacement.
This meme is riffing on a rivalry that goes back to the 1970s fuel crisis, when import fuel economy started chipping away at muscle car dominance and a dismissive slang term was born in response. The joke still works because the regional divide it pokes fun at never really closed. Heres where the insult actually came from and why its still debated today.
A Chevy Monte Carlo’s wheels detach mid-burnout at Track Mania Car Show 2K17 in Memphis, spinning freely on the pavement while the car itself grinds to a stop. Commenters point to oversized 24-inch wheels and stock supporting hardware as the likely culprit. Watch the moment that turned a routine burnout run into one of the scene’s most-replayed clips.
Nearly five minutes long and first aired on NBC’s American Dreams to launch the redesigned 2005 Mustang, this commercial tells the story of a Marine coming home to a driveway surprise from his father. The comments reveal a twist the ad never states outright, plus a running debate over whether it even counts as a true Ford commercial rather than just a Mustang one. Even self-described Chevy loyalists admit it’s hard to dislike. Watch to see why it still gets shared more than fifteen years later.