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There’s a decades-old argument about which brand of American muscle actually deserves bragging rights, and at a test track outside Las Vegas, you can settle it with a stopwatch instead of an opinion. This roundup covers the Richard Petty Driving Experience’s American Muscle Car Challenge alongside a 145-car Barrett-Jackson consignment, a packed holiday cruise-in, and a widow’s tribute to her car-loving husband.
Royce Peterson wired the full asking price for a rare 1968 Cobra Jet Cougar XR7 after just thirty minutes of thought, convinced the car might be connected to a personal encounter with drag racing legend Don ‘Dyno Don’ Nicholson fourteen years earlier. Only 10 to 12 Cobra Jet Cougars from that model year are known to exist. Read on for how a chance trackside conversation became a decade-spanning provenance mystery.
While working on unrelated 1956 and 1957 Napco trucks, CarGuyLuke stumbles onto a back lot holding five late-1960s Mopars, including two Hemi Chargers, a 1969 model built in fewer than 1,000 units and a four-speed 1968 example limited to just 467. VIN-by-VIN decoding on camera confirms exactly what each car is and how rare it really is. Watch to see all five cars broken down in detail.
No-prep drag racing deliberately leaves the track surface untreated, which turns every run into a fight against a car’s own power rather than a clean launch. A modified 1955 Chevy Bel Air known as 55 2.0 has put together a six-race, six-win streak in that format while running only two of its three nitrous kits. Holding power in reserve on a surface designed to punish anyone who cannot manage grip is the interesting part.
Carroll Shelby’s original pitch was simple: take a British roadster nobody in America had heard of, drop in a big V8, and build something that could embarrass cars costing three times as much. Ford said yes after Chevrolet turned him down, unwilling to create a rival for the Corvette. Only 126 Mark I Cobras were ever built, split almost evenly between two different V8s. Here’s the story behind the bloodline that started it all.
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.
The Ford Galaxie’s first three model years hid a genuine engineering experiment behind conventional full-size styling — a batch of roughly 200 lightweight race-only cars built to shed weight nobody expected Ford to bother losing. Add a one-year-only retractable hardtop and a short-lived Starliner body style, and the 1959-1961 Galaxie turns out to be far more interesting than its reputation as just a big sedan suggests. Read on for what made these years different.
Car shows have paired glamour with chrome since long before social media existed, and this shot is part of that decades-old tradition. Detroit’s ad agencies leaned on the same formula during the muscle car horsepower wars, using lifestyle imagery to sell engines as much as looks. It raises an old debate that’s never really been settled: when a photo like this shows up, what’s actually catching your eye first?
Every talk show has to introduce its people before it can earn an audience’s trust, and that’s the job of this opening episode. Before the builds, the history deep-dives, and the debates over which engine option really was the best, meet the host and editor who’ll be shaping every episode that follows.
The Ford Capri and the Mustang share a designer and a mission – but only one of them is still in production after more than fifty years. The Capri’s last-ever example, the 280 ‘Brooklands,’ was one of just 1,038 built, and driving it back to back with a modern Mustang GT reveals exactly why one nameplate survived and the other didn’t.
In 1970, the major American manufacturers were still building cars without significant emissions or fuel economy constraints, and the result was a showroom floor that would be illegal in its current form by 1973. V8TV’s Muscle Car of the Week episode #201 digs into the ten quickest cars of that year as reported by the automotive press, pairing historical quarter-mile data with examples from The Brothers Collection. The numbers are still remarkable more than fifty years later.
A 174-day labor strike at Chevrolet’s Norwood plant nearly ended the Camaro entirely in 1972, and roughly 1,100 partially assembled cars were scrapped outright because they could not meet the next year’s bumper rules. What survived that year became the rarest Z/28 of the second generation, with just 2,575 built. On steel Rally wheels and raised white letter tires, it looks exactly as it did on a 1972 showroom floor. Read on to find out how close this car came to never existing.
Pontiac has the strongest claim to inventing the category. Ford has the sales records by an enormous margin. Dodge and Plymouth have what collectors are willing to pay today, which is a completely different ranking. Every camp is quoting a real number and reaching a different answer, because they are all using different measuring sticks. Read on for what each one actually proves, and which one settles it.
A turbocharged modern Camaro and a nitrous-fed first-generation car lined up at the same Redemption 6.0 session in Tulsa, Oklahoma, finally putting decades of new-school-versus-old-school arguments to an actual test. Urban Hillbilly Videos captured the Big Tire Class run in full, unedited, letting two completely different performance philosophies settle their differences on the same strip. Read on to see which approach came out ahead.
Ask ten muscle car fans to pick just one favorite from a lineup like this, and you’ll get eleven answers and at least one argument. That’s the point — this isn’t really about naming a winner, it’s about what your pick reveals about the kind of enthusiast you are. Here’s why this debate never actually gets settled.