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The P code on this 1956 Fairlane Sunliner’s data plate identifies the Thunderbird Special, a 312-cubic-inch V8 with a four-barrel carburetor rated at 225 horsepower, the strongest engine Ford offered that year. Pulled from a private California collection and wearing correct Bermuda Blue and Diamond Blue paint, it is a documented top-tier car rather than another dressed-up convertible. Here is what that code actually bought.
The 1968 Dodge Charger R/T redefined what a Mopar intermediate could look like, trading its predecessor’s slow-selling fastback for the coke-bottle body that later made it famous as the General Lee. Under the hood of this particular car sits the 375-horsepower 440 Magnum wedge — Hemi-adjacent thrust without the Hemi’s finicky tune or price tag. AutoMastersHQ’s in-depth review puts both the styling and the performance to the test.
Most tire companies ignore the classic car market because the volumes are small and the requirements are awkward. Tireco went after it anyway with the Milestar Streetsteel, a checkered-flag-sidewall all-season aimed squarely at muscle cars, hot rods, and classic trucks. The company that built it started out selling bicycle tires in Torrance in 1972. Here is how a niche tire like this gets made, and what to look for when shopping for one.
Every original 1977 Trans Am used in Smokey and the Bandit was destroyed after filming, leaving replicas as the only way to own a piece of the film’s legacy. Burt Reynolds commissioned his own painstaking recreation, drove it for tens of thousands of miles, and it later sold at auction for ,500 – with a similar Reynolds-owned replica later fetching over ,000. Here’s why collectors pay real money for a car that’s technically not the original.
Classic Recreations, the only shop officially licensed to build continuation Shelby Mustangs, just did something purists never saw coming: it dropped a turbocharged EcoBoost engine into a car built to honor Carroll Shelby’s big-block legacy. Owner Jason Engel says the move isn’t about abandoning tradition, it’s about keeping a niche, hand-built business alive in markets where displacement taxes make a big V8 impractical. Read on to find out how a turbocharged Shelby continuation stacks up against the original.
A gold 1966 Buick Riviera with a 425 Nailhead V8 has been in the same hands since 1991 — the same year its owner brought his newborn daughter home. Filmed at the World of Wheels show in West Allis, Wisconsin, the car’s clean fastback design and factory-correct paint draw comparisons to Buick’s best-ever styling era. What’s kept one owner holding on for three decades?
Gearhead Garage’s Jason breaks down eleven specific modifications that commonly hurt a classic muscle car’s performance, safety, or value — from rear disc brake conversions to flex fans to spooled rear differentials. The comment section turns into its own confirmation hearing, with longtime owners describing which of these mistakes they made on their own builds and what it cost them to fix. Watch to see the full list and decide how many you have made yourself.
What started in 1983 as a single one-day car show in a California fairgrounds parking lot grew into a national circuit spanning coast to coast — though not every East Coast venue has stuck the way its longtime Hudson Valley date has. Here’s how Goodguys built its reputation, and why a show with 1,500-plus hot rods and muscle cars running for decades in Rhinebeck matters more than it looks.
Planning a road trip around America’s best muscle car museums? One name that used to top these lists, Florida’s Muscle Car City, closed for good in 2021 and sold off its 200-plus car collection at auction. Here’s an updated look at which classic muscle car museums are still standing – including the one built next to an actual Corvette assembly plant, and why institutional backing matters more than you’d think.
Mecum’s January 2016 Kissimmee auction closed with more than 91 million dollars in sales across ten days, led by four Hemi-powered Mopar convertibles that combined for over 7.5 million dollars. A 78 percent sell-through rate and a 30 percent year-over-year jump in totals made it the highest-grossing sale in company history. See the full top-10 list and what each car brought.
Pontiac needed an answer to the Camaro and it needed one immediately, so the first Firebird arrived only weeks after its corporate cousin, sharing bones but tuned to feel like a Pontiac rather than a rebadged Chevrolet. Fewer than 16,000 buyers chose the convertible that first year. The engine lineup, meanwhile, does not match what most people assume about early Firebirds, and one commonly claimed engine was not available at all.
This 1967 Pontiac GTO started its restoration looking, in one viewer’s words, like it had been dragged out of a swamp — rusted through and barely recognizable. V8 Speed and Resto Shop’s frame-off rebuild brought it back to its factory-correct Tyrol Blue, complete with its original Pontiac 400 four-barrel V8 and every factory comfort option intact, before unveiling it at the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals. Watch the full transformation from swamp find to show winner.
Beyond the well-known bargains, plenty of affordable muscle car ownership still hides in plain sight. Cars like the Chevrolet Nova, Dodge Dart Sport, and Buick Skylark deliver real small-block performance for a fraction of what a comparable Camaro or Mustang costs. The simple reason: fewer buyers chase these badges, which keeps demand, and prices, refreshingly low.
Studebaker restyled its 1955 President to compete with Cadillac and Lincoln, but the real story is hiding in the engine bay. A quiet running change partway through the model year gave later cars more horsepower than earlier ones, with no visible way to tell them apart. Here is what changed, and why only 24,665 were ever built.
Ford built over 600,000 Mustangs for 1966, which makes it easy to assume every survivor is interchangeable. A factory four-speed convertible with the 289, the Deluxe Pony interior and styled steel wheels says otherwise, because most convertible buyers took the automatic and skipped the performance boxes. The letter stamped in the engine code changes everything about how one of these drives. Here is how to read a 1966 Mustang properly before you buy one.