Posts Tagged: Chevrolet
You have found it: a gorgeous 1966 Chevelle SS 396, freshly finished, glowing under the garage lights, with a seller who swears every panel is right. Then you notice the details that do not quite add up. The engine bay has bits that look too modern, the badges are perfect, and the paperwork is thin. Plenty of buyers have written a very large check on a Chevelle that was a Malibu in a Super Sport costume, or a real SS whose original hardware had quietly been swapped for aftermarket parts. The difference can be tens of thousands of dollars in value, and it is rarely obvious in a driveway walk-around. Here is what a full build video teaches about what these cars really are underneath, and how to inspect one before you sign anything.
A beat-up 1972 Chevrolet Nova wearing dog-dish hubcaps and a decade of patina doesn’t look like it could outrun anything on four wheels. Under the hood, a twin-supercharged LS2 built by Kurt Urban makes 1,160 horsepower and sends the car into nine-second quarter-mile territory. Here’s the story behind one of the internet’s most famous sleepers.
You found it — a 1967 Corvette Sting Ray sitting in a garage, dusty but complete, priced thousands below what a finished example sells for. The math looks obvious: buy it cheap, do the restoration yourself, and end up with a six-figure classic for a fraction of the price. Then you talk to a shop that has restored hundreds of these cars, and the math stops looking so obvious. A proper frame-off restoration on a C2 Corvette can run 1,000 to 1,200 labor hours before a single part gets ordered, and once paint, trim, and mechanical work are added in, the total routinely clears $100,000. The bargain project sitting in that garage might only be a bargain if you already know exactly what condition it’s really in — and that’s the part most buyers get wrong. Here’s what separates a smart buy from an expensive lesson.
Chevrolet only built the dual-quad 409 for a handful of years before the Mark IV big-block replaced it in 1965, and fewer than 9,000 Impalas got the engine in its final season. Here’s what made the 425-horsepower dual-quad version special, why survivors are so rare, and what to check before buying one.
Chevrolet has only ever used the LT5 badge on two Corvette engines – one hand-assembled by a boat-motor company in Oklahoma, the other a supercharged monster built nearly 30 years later. The first set FIA world records within weeks of hitting showrooms; the second made 350 more horsepower. Here’s why GM recycled the name instead of starting fresh.
Comedian Gabriel Iglesias just showed off two 1988 Monte Carlo SS coupes on Jay Leno’s Garage, and one of them still has the factory plastic on its seats. Chevrolet built just 16,204 before retiring the G-body platform for good. Here’s why a 180-horsepower cruiser from 1988 still makes grown men weak in the knees.
You’ve found it: a numbers-matching 1966 Chevelle SS 396, the car that made muscle-car legends and the one you’ve been chasing for years. There’s just one problem. A documented, original SS 396 can command tens of thousands of dollars more than an identical-looking Chevelle Malibu hiding a small-block under the hood, and that price gap has turned clone-building into a decades-old cottage industry. Somebody with a die stamp, a donor 396, and a few weekends of shop time can turn a modest Malibu into a badge-and-stripe “SS 396” — and unless you know exactly where to look, you’ll hand over a five-figure premium for a car that isn’t what the seller says it is. The good news is that the tells are there if you know what you’re looking at: stamped numbers in places clone-builders routinely forget, fuel line diameters that don’t lie, and factory details that are nearly impossible to fake all at once. This guide walks through what a recent deep-dive video gets right about spotting the difference, backs it up with the car’s federal recall history, and gives you the exact spots to check before you put down a deposit.
A 1969 Chevy Nova rolled into Roadkill Garage as a bare shell — and rolled out packing more than 1,000 horsepower. Hosts David Freiburger and Steve Dulcich built the entire street/strip package from scratch, then hauled it straight to the track to see if the numbers held up. Fans are calling it one of the show’s best comebacks yet.
A black cherry 1970 Chevelle LS6 carries a VIN and trim-tag date stamp that place it at the very end of that year’s production run, fueling a claim that it may be the last LS6 ever built. With 450 horsepower and 500 lb-ft from its 454 big block, it briefly out-muscled the Corvette itself. Only 4,475 were ever made.
Jeff Lutz’s twin-turbo, 3,000-horsepower ’57 Chevy squared off again against Alex Taylor’s street-driven ’55 at the 2026 Tri-Five Nationals — and the power gap didn’t tell the whole story. Fans who expected a lopsided pass instead got a race close enough to argue about for days. Here’s what makes these two Tri-Five builds, and the family history behind them, worth knowing.
A 1972 Chevy Nova that spent four decades sinking into the dirt gets a second chance in Hagerty’s newest budget build. Restoration duo Dustin Hallinan and John Brito set themselves a brutal number: bring it back to life for less than $5,000. What they find underneath says a lot about what’s still possible in today’s classic car market.
A dust-covered 1963 Corvette Sting Ray came out of a barn on a detailing channel — and viewers immediately recognized it as one of the rarest Corvettes ever built. Its split rear window lasted exactly one model year before GM killed it, and today it drives six-figure auction prices. But it was the story behind the car’s owner, surfaced entirely in the comments, that turned 587,000 views into something closer to a tribute.
A 1970 Chevelle SS built by NR Classics trades its factory big block for a 468 stroker that Chevrolet never offered from the showroom floor. Air suspension, Wilwood brakes, and a Holley Sniper EFI system replace nearly everything else underneath the blacked-out body. It keeps the shape people fell for in 1970 and rethinks almost everything that made it hard to live with.
You’ve found it: a numbers-matching 1967 Corvette Sting Ray, big-block 427 under the hood, sitting in a barn find listing or a classifieds ad with a price that seems almost too good. Before you hand over a deposit, understand what you’re actually buying. The C2 Sting Ray’s fiberglass body can hide decades of hidden rust in the steel frame and birdcage structure underneath it, and a “numbers-matching” claim is only as good as the paperwork and stampings behind it. One restoration featured by Car and Driver — of a 427 roadster owned by the magazine’s own technical director — shows exactly how deep those problems can run, and how rewarding it is to dig them out properly. This guide walks through what that restoration revealed, what NHTSA has on record for the Corvette of this era, and what you need to check before you buy.