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A 1968 Pontiac Firebird ordered with the right boxes checked could carry the 400 H.O. package or the mid-year Ram Air II update, complete with round-port heads and a reworked camshaft most buyers never knew existed. Out of over 107,000 Firebirds built that year, only 16,960 were convertibles, making a documented Ram Air drop-top a genuine rarity. Read on to find out what actually separated a standard 400 from Pontiac’s best-kept 1968 secret.
Every 1970 Chevelle SS 396 badge tells a small lie, and the parenthetical in this convertible’s own description gives it away. The 396 that year was really a 402, bored out for reasons that had nothing to do with power, and Chevrolet kept the old emblem anyway. This 350-horsepower drop-top adds bucket seats, tilt wheel, air conditioning, and a power top to the story. Read on to find out why the badge and the engine stopped matching.
A Buick GSX built during a five-month factory window in 1970 raises a genuine documentation question for its current owners — one that even a close look at the car’s trim and colors can’t fully settle. Its Stage 1 engine option carried an official rating widely considered too conservative for what the car could actually do. Here’s the open question at the center of this particular GSX.
Restoration shop owner Luciano ‘Lucky’ Lacerda built this 1961 Cadillac Series 62 Convertible specifically to showcase his own shop’s work at SEMA, finishing it in a deep green that stands out even at a packed Scottsdale cars-and-coffee. It’s a deliberate choice in a SEMA field dominated by trucks and muscle cars. Watch to see what a restoration shop owner picks when the whole point is to prove what he can do.
This 1966 Chevrolet Chevelle convertible is not a trailer queen or an over-the-top custom. It is a genuinely nice cruiser with a supercharged LSX under the hood, a tasteful custom interior, a great stance, and the right wheels. The ’66 was the year the Chevelle found its coke-bottle shape, and dropping modern LS power into that body is one of the smartest moves a builder can make. Read on to find out why the combination works so well.
By 1972, Oldsmobile’s 4-4-2 had been quietly demoted from its own model to an option code, built on its final A-body convertible platform before a full redesign eliminated the body style. Only a small fraction of that year’s 4-4-2-optioned Cutlasses were convertibles, and fewer still carried the top W-30 455 engine package. Here’s how rare the combination actually turned out to be.
At the 25th Annual Indian Uprising, an all-Pontiac-only show in St. Charles, Illinois, owner Richard Larabee’s Tyrol Blue 1967 Catalina 2+2 stood out enough to take home an award. Lou Costabile records the factory 428 cold-starting on camera, while the comments fill with viewers recalling their own history with the model going back to 1967 showroom brochures. Watch to hear the big block come alive and see why this specific combination of options makes the car so desirable.
This Tahoe Turquoise 1966 Ford Mustang convertible carries the 76B Pony interior package, a 225-horsepower 289 four-barrel, factory wire hubcaps, and a power top — nearly every option a 1966 convertible buyer could check. Ford sold over 72,000 Mustang convertibles that year, more than double its nearest rival. Read on to find out exactly what made the Pony interior worth the extra money.
Pontiac never built a 428-cubic-inch Firebird, which makes this 1967 convertible’s engine bay a genuine puzzle until you realize the builder stayed entirely within Pontiac’s own performance parts family. Backed by a four-speed manual and topped with Edelbrock aluminum heads, this is a big-inch build with a cleaner pedigree than most cross-brand engine swaps. Read on to find out where that 428 actually came from.
Only 1,325 of the 22,229 Corvettes Chevrolet built for 1964 left the factory with the L84 fuel-injected 327 under the hood, and fewer still survive as numbers-matching convertibles. Owners Bob Atkins and Fred Haraf have kept this silver-on-black example since 2011, and they know exactly what separates a genuine fuelie from a car wearing the right badges and nothing else. Read on to find out what makes this 375-horsepower Sting Ray one of the rarest combinations Chevrolet ever built.
Plymouth’s Lemon Twist paint code paired with a 426 Hemi and a four-speed manual makes for one of the rarest combinations in the entire muscle car world — a car so scarce that most Mopar fans will never see one in person. Read on to find out just how few of these actually left the factory, and why that number keeps shrinking the more you dig.
Convertibles get overlooked in the muscle car world, and this scarce 1969 Pontiac Firebird 400 drop-top is proof they shouldn’t be. Pontiac built barely over 11,000 open-air Firebirds that year, and adding the big-inch 400 on top made this combination rare even when it was new. Read on to find out what makes a genuine 400 convertible worth chasing decades later.
This 1967 Camaro convertible trades its long-gone factory small-block for a 383 stroker, backed by a TH350 automatic, Hugger Orange paint, and enough chassis work to put real power down. Convertibles were already the rarer first-gen Camaro body style before anyone touched the drivetrain. Read on to find out what it takes to build a driver-focused first-gen right.
This 1961 Chevrolet Impala SS convertible carries a badge that traces back to a genuinely rare factory combination, only 142 original Impalas got both the SS package and the new 409 V8 before a production issue shut it down. This particular car skips all of that history entirely, running a modern 572 cubic-inch big block that dwarfs anything Chevrolet’s engineers could have offered in 1961. Read on to find out just how rare the real thing actually was.
This 1966 Pontiac GTO convertible carries PHS documentation tracing it back to Moody Pontiac in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and it left the factory with the 389 four-barrel, power steering, power brakes and factory air conditioning. 1966 was the year the GTO stopped being an option package and became a model in its own right, and buyers responded by making it the best-selling muscle car in America. The convertible was always the scarcer half of that story. Read on for what separates a documented survivor from the clones.