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At the 2012 Grand Rod Run, one lucky sixteen-year-old received a birthday present most enthusiasts wait a lifetime for: a 1969 Chevy Nova SS 396 street rod, big-block and all. It’s a compact Chevy with a reputation for humbling more expensive machinery, and handing it to a new driver takes serious trust. The story behind the gift is as good as the car. Watch to meet the owner and the Nova.
One of these two Chevrolets could be ordered by nearly anyone with the cash; the other required knowing about a hidden engine code most dealers had never heard of. Both hid more horsepower than their factory ratings admitted to. Here’s how a mass-produced 450-horsepower Chevelle and a nearly unobtainable 71-unit Camaro both earned a permanent place in muscle car history.
A minivan is the last vehicle anyone expects to make real horsepower, which is exactly why BoostedBoiKyle built this turbocharged sleeper in the first place. The build trades naturally aspirated muscle car tradition for boost, packaged into a platform nobody at the dealership ever imagined tuning. It is the same sleeper instinct that has driven car culture for decades, just aimed somewhere unexpected. Watch to see what happens once the turbo actually spools.
Plymouth built the Road Runner as a bare-bones budget muscle car for 1969, then midway through the model year quietly dropped in a 440 Six Barrel engine and a fiberglass hood under the A12 option code. This Vitamin C Orange example, sourced from the Brothers Collection, represents one of the most aggressive running changes of the entire muscle car era. Few A12 cars survive with this level of documentation. See what made the mid-year package so different.
A 1970 Dodge Challenger doesn’t get many chances to find its actual top end on American roads, but on Germany’s unrestricted Autobahn, this car gets to answer that question for real. Filmed from the driver’s seat with synced speedo and sound, this is one entry in an ongoing series chasing exactly that answer. Watch to see how a fifty-plus-year-old pony car handles roads it was never built for.
1967 was the year the Plymouth Satellite got quietly outranked by its own family. The new Belvedere GTX arrived that year with a 440 wedgehead V8 and, for the first time, a genuine Hemi option. The Satellite carried on as Plymouth’s value performance pick, powered by a 383 available with either a two-barrel or four-barrel carburetor. Here’s how the B-body pecking order shifted in a single model year.
A 1970 Plymouth Road Runner sat forgotten for decades before someone finally read its fender tag — and realized it was VIN #00015, the very first 1970 Road Runner ever built. Under the hood sits a legendary 426 Hemi backed by a four-speed, making it one of just 44 coupes built that way. This is the kind of barn find collectors dream about and almost never see. Watch to find out what it might be worth.
By 1971 the muscle car era was already cooling off, and Buick’s Gran Sport had to adapt to new fuel and emissions realities without losing its identity. This GS 350 survived that transition looking sharp, one of a shrinking number left from a production run that barely broke nine thousand cars. Here is what made the 1971 GS a genuinely interesting footnote in Buick’s performance history, not just a leftover from better years.
This vintage road test captures a 1971 Dodge Challenger 383 exactly as period buyers would have experienced it, with no idea yet that the model would go on to become a genuine collector icon. The 383 sat as the attainable middle option below the 440 and Hemi, the version most real buyers actually drove home. Watching it judged on its own contemporary terms reveals something modern reviews cannot. See what the era actually thought of it.
This side-by-side pits an original Hertz-era Shelby GT350 against a brand-new one, a genuine continuation car from Revology Cars, the only company Ford has ever licensed to build reproduction Mustangs from scratch. With an all-new steel body, a modern Coyote V8, and Carroll Shelby’s own blessing, it’s the closest thing to buying a factory-fresh 1965 GT350 six decades later.
Cy Schmidt’s 1969 Mercury Cyclone CJ has spent decades doing exactly what it was built for, cruising the backroads of Ohio instead of sitting under a cover. Mercury built the Cyclone as its answer to the Mustang, and the Cobra Jet engine under the hood gave it a reputation gearheads still respect today. Petrolicious caught up with Schmidt for a late-afternoon drive that shows why this often-overlooked muscle car still turns heads. Watch to find out why.
The Drive set out to find the best third-generation Camaro in existence and came back with an IROC that most enthusiasts wouldn’t expect: a car built over years of patient, obsessive modification into what the team calls the perfect version of a chassis everyone else has written off. It’s a serious rebuttal to anyone who dismisses the ’80s Camaro on sight. Watch to find out why.