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HOT ROD Power Tour 2017 rolled from Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City to Iowa Speedway and the Davenport fairgrounds, and the cars stealing the show belonged to the 1970s: the last high-compression muscle of the early decade and the blower-scooped, white-letter-tired street machines that followed. The decade Detroit almost gave up on turned out to be the crowd favorite. Read on to find out why ’70s survivors and tributes drew the tightest crowds on the tour.
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.
Long before burnouts became crowd-pleasing spectacle, they served a practical purpose on the drag strip: heating and cleaning the tires for maximum grip. Trace the tradition from a dusty Georgia strip in the 1960s through fire-enhanced showmanship to today’s purpose-built burnout cars, and you’ll see why this smoky ritual still defines muscle car culture.
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.
A compilation channel gathers years of submitted footage showing real, engine-powered miniature cars, from a shrunken drag-strip Nova to a scaled Peterbilt semi that fooled more than one viewer. The engineering behind fitting a genuine running engine into a fraction of factory scale is more complicated than it looks, and more impressive once you see it done well.
Nothing turns heads at a muscle car meet like a hard launch that lifts the front wheels clean off the pavement. It looks like pure chaos, but the physics behind a wheelstand actually explain why some of the fastest cars in the lineup do it on purpose. Here is what is really happening in that split second before the tires touch back down.
Ten reveals hit the floor of the 2017 New York International Auto Show, from a twin-turbo Lincoln Navigator shedding 200 pounds to Honda’s unprecedented three-way electric, hybrid, and hydrogen bet on the Clarity nameplate. A few aisles over, Dodge quietly stole the spotlight with a burnout demonstration previewing the Challenger SRT Demon. Not every debut that grabbed headlines that week turned out to matter years later. Read on to find out which ones actually reshaped their segments.