 |
Five cars defined 1960s muscle car culture, but two of them have wilder backstories than most people realize: a GTO that exploited a GM loophole to become a 32,450-unit phenomenon, and a Barracuda so rare its Hemi convertible now sells for millions. Here’s what made these five cars the icons they became.
Gas Gears and Glory’s short documentary “The Complete History of American Muscle Cars” traces the genre from its 1960s birth through the decades that nearly killed it and the modern era that brought it roaring back. It’s the kind of overview that names names — Mustang, Camaro, Challenger — while asking what actually made these cars matter beyond their horsepower figures. Watch to see how the story gets told this time around.
What began in 2005 as a casual cookout for members of an online Camaro and Firebird forum has grown into one of Michigan’s biggest car shows, drawing F-Bodies from every generation to a Milford parking lot each year. Since 2013, the event has doubled as a charity fundraiser, giving car culture a purpose beyond the parking lot. Stock survivors and heavily modified pro-touring builds share the same field this Saturday. Read on to find out what turned a small group cookout into the state’s largest F-Body gathering.
The 2011 Ford Mustang GT, 2010 Chevrolet Camaro SS and 2010 Dodge Challenger SRT8 gave up horsepower to each other in almost every direction, yet the finishing order at the drag strip was never really in doubt once curb weights entered the picture. One of the three carried nearly 500 pounds more than another. Read on for the numbers, the chassis differences, and why the least powerful car kept winning.
Dodge arrived at the pony car party six years late and compensated by offering more engines than anyone else, from a 383 all the way to the 426 Hemi. The Challenger R/T was the sharp end of that lineup, and the cars that stayed with one family instead of getting flipped or raced into the ground are now the ones collectors chase hardest. Read on for what made the first-generation car special.
Chevrolet built the supercharged 6.2-liter LS9 for exactly one car, the 638-horsepower Corvette ZR1, and then builders started putting it in 1969 Camaros. The engine is the easy part; it already has forged internals, dry-sump oiling, and an Eaton blower. Everything the factory bolted around a 1969 unibody is what has to be replaced to survive it. Read on to find out what an LS9 swap actually demands underneath the sheet metal.
Two black Chevrolets separated by fifty years: a 1969 Chevelle SS, whose performance package cost 348 dollars as an option box, and a 2017 Camaro ZL1 with 650 supercharged horsepower and a 198 mph top speed. The modern car wins every measurable contest, and it is not close. But the comparison gets far more interesting once you look at what each car cost relative to everything else on sale that year. Read on to find out which one was the better deal.
February 2017 produced a pony car sales result almost nobody predicted: the Dodge Challenger, on a platform already a decade old, comfortably outsold the freshly redesigned Chevrolet Camaro while the Ford Mustang took the month outright. The numbers said something uncomfortable about what buyers actually want from a muscle car. Read on for the figures and what they revealed about the segment.
The sixth-generation Chevrolet Camaro arrived for 2016 on a lighter platform borrowed from Cadillac, with a drive mode setting aimed squarely at the one condition rear-wheel-drive muscle cars are famous for failing. Two hundred fewer pounds, a five-link rear end, and a Snow/Ice program changed the math on whether this car can survive a winter road trip. Read on to find out how much of that actually helps once the pavement disappears.
This 1968 Camaro looks like a tidy first-generation restoration until the timing board lights up: 7.79 seconds at 179 mph, run in Street Outlaw trim at Wild Horse Pass Raceway. A twin-turbocharged combination hides behind factory-style sheet metal, in a chassis that first went on sale more than half a century ago. Read on to find out how builders are extracting purpose-built race car numbers from a body shell most people still think of as a weekend cruiser.
A 3,000-horsepower Camaro rolled onto a freshly scraped, no-prep surface at Thunder Valley Raceway and ended up sideways against a nitrous Fox Body Mustang nicknamed Lucifer. This piece explains why no-prep racing strips away the grip that normally tames this much power, what it takes to build a big-tire car for that kind of unpredictability, and how this run compares to a properly prepped six-second pass.
Chevrolet never offered the L88 in a Camaro — it was a Corvette-only option, and only 80 Corvettes received one for all of 1968. So when a restoration describes its Camaro engine as L88-inspired, that phrase is carrying real weight. This rotisserie-restored ’68 SS runs a Gen IV 427 making 480 horsepower behind a four-speed. Read on for what the original L88 actually was and why builders still chase the name sixty years later.
A 1969 Camaro with 680 horsepower, a full custom interior, one-off wheels, and McLaren paint looks like a horsepower story. It is not. The Gen V LT1 is rated around 455 horsepower from the factory, so reaching 680 means real work, and making a 1969 unibody survive it means replacing almost everything underneath. Read on to find out where the money in a build like this actually goes, and why the power figure is the least useful thing about it.
A street-driven, twin-turbo Pontiac Trans Am takes on a big-block 1969 Chevrolet Camaro in an unscripted head-to-head run from Road Test TV, with the Trans Am finding traction while the Camaro’s torque spins its tires off the line. The Trans Am crosses at 7.89 seconds and 180 miles per hour, numbers that hold up against sanctioned strip runs. Watch to see exactly where the Camaro loses ground before either engine ever reaches full potential.
In 2016, the muscle car market was shrinking almost everywhere except one corner of it – Hellcat sales climbed nearly 70 percent while overall Challenger and Charger volumes both fell. The family SUV mentioned almost in passing in this piece would eventually get the same supercharged treatment, at a price tag nobody saw coming back then.