 |
1970 finally gave the Ford Ranchero its own identity — Ranchero or Ranchero GT badges on the glovebox instead of Fairlane or Torino script, plus a pointed grille, hideaway headlights, and coke-bottle styling that left the old body looking dated overnight. Four distinct trims rolled out that year, from the woodgrain Squire to a GT that could be ordered with a 370-horsepower 429 Cobra Jet. Here’s how Ford split its unibody truck-car into four very different personalities for one model year.
Snowball Bishop’s old Ford coupe dirt-track racer sat behind his barn for decades, its Chrysler 440 V8 silent and its racing days seemingly over. Hagerty’s Redline Rebuild crew took on the full teardown-to-startup rebuild, hitting real delays along the way before finally getting the engine running and the car back on an actual dirt track after a fifty-year hiatus. It’s grassroots racing history, not a garage queen.
Ford built exactly 57 of these R-code Fairlanes in 1966, not for showroom sales, but to satisfy a NASCAR homologation rule requiring a minimum production run. Every one wore the same white-over-black color combination and hid a 427 side-oiler under a stripped-down interior. Only about 25 are believed to survive. Here is the story behind Ford’s rarest mid-size muscle car.
This blown alcohol engine was mid-pull on ALEXort2007’s dyno when something let go — and the comments have been debating exactly what ever since. Was it a dropped rod, an electrical arc, or a motor simply held at redline too long? Whatever the cause, one thing everyone agrees on: it’s a far better place for an engine to fail than in the middle of a quarter-mile pass.
This thirty-minute compilation from Vantaa Cruising, a recurring car meet in Tikkurila, Finland, captures a night of burnouts, custom hot rods, and modified American muscle that one Oregon-based commenter admitted could never happen back home. There’s not a single Mustang in the lineup, but there is a rubber duck mounted as a hood ornament. Watch to see how seriously Finland’s underground muscle car scene takes American car culture.
A 2014 Camaro SS and a 2015 Dodge Challenger RT go head to head in this Los Angeles street race, but the real story is the setup — the host studies the Camaro’s 6.2-liter LS3 before racing it against his own daily-driven, 5.7-liter HEMI Challenger. The displacement gap suggests an easy winner. Real pavement doesn’t always agree. Watch the pull to see which V8 actually gets there first.
A genuine 426 Hemi Road Runner, one of only 152 built in 1970, lines up against a 1972 Oldsmobile 442 W-30, one of just 772 built that year, in a quarter-mile grudge match that splits the difference between torque and top end. The W-30’s blueprinted 455 gets off the line first, but the Hemi’s legendary top-end pull closes the gap by the traps. Viewers have been arguing in the comments ever since about which car actually deserved the win. Watch the run and decide for yourself which factory got it right.
An ’08 Smart Car running a boosted Toyota Paseo engine lined up against a Shelby Mustang on a Colorado test-and-tune night, and the first run nearly ended in a wheelstand before the car even left the line. By the second pass, the tiny hatchback had cut its time to 12.53 at 107 mph and put the Mustang on the trailer. Drag racing regulars in the comments call it one of the purest sleeper builds they have seen. Watch to see exactly how a car this small pulls it off.
Pontiac built just 17 examples of the 1971 GTO Judge convertible, and this white, unassuming-looking survivor from The Brothers Collection is one of them. Sharp-eyed viewers spotted honest rust on its rear quarter panel, proof this is a preserved original rather than a show-polished restoration. Commenters still debate why so few were ever built. Watch Muscle Car Of The Week’s 202nd episode take a close look at one of Pontiac’s rarest configurations.
This 1962 Buick Invicta wagon carries the nickname “Airwagon,” earned when Air Ride Technologies took on the rare nine-passenger body style as a build project. Under the hood sits a numbers-matching 401 Nailhead V8, swapped from its original two-speed Turbine Drive automatic to a smoother four-speed. Gateway Classic Cars photographed the full car for this gallery, from the engine bay to the polished chrome trim, one of the least common body styles Buick built during the Invicta’s run.
Not every muscle car is equally easy to bring back to life, and the difference usually comes down to how deep the aftermarket parts catalog runs. From the Mustang and Camaro to the Chevelle and beyond, some nameplates make restoration dramatically simpler than others. Read on to find out which cars make the cut and why.
Only about 50 of the roughly 44,808 Mustang convertibles Ford built in 1967 carried the rare K-code 289 HiPo V8, and most of that engine’s already-tiny production run went straight to Carroll Shelby instead. This triple-black example from the Brothers Collection might be the only one wearing a black deluxe interior. Here’s why documented K-code cars carry such a premium, and how collectors prove one is real.
Ten thousand photographs, six months of shop time, and one badly worn 1967 Mustang convertible come together in this time-lapse restoration from Julius Bencko’s former shop, Mustangs4you.com. Convertibles from this era carry restoration challenges hardtops never face, from reinforced unibody structure to convertible-specific top mechanisms that are notoriously difficult to source. Watch a frame-off restoration compress six months of invisible labor into just a few minutes.
All Speed Customs skipped the Hemi entirely on this 1971 Plymouth Barracuda, dropping a V-10 and a paddle-shift transmission into a body reworked with custom modifications, silver paint, and red accents. The build, nicknamed Medusa, stopped traffic at the 2017 Detroit Autorama with a back-seat ‘wall of sound’ audio system and a fully custom interior. One viewer said it belonged in the Louvre. See why this Cuda broke every rule a numbers-matching restoration would follow.
A Shelby Cobra doing donuts on what looks like an office floor, filmed back in 2011, comes with a title that gives away exactly how things ended at home. Behind the joke is one of the most significant nameplates in American performance car history, Carroll Shelby’s lightweight, big-block giant-killer that’s spawned a massive replica culture since original examples became nearly unobtainable. See why this clip still finds new viewers well over a decade later.