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This 1934-style Ford coupe hides an outlandish build sheet: three Chevy 350 V8s, 24 exhaust pipes, 16 coats of Imron paint, and Bridge of Weir leather inside. See what the photos confirm about this triple-engine show piece, and why builds this extreme almost never make it past the fabrication stage.
This vintage promotional film captures Chevrolet’s original 1953 announcement of the Corvette, a car nobody was certain American buyers actually wanted. Commenters — including some old enough to remember passing on early Corvettes for a few hundred dollars decades later — trace a direct line from this uncertain debut to today’s mid-engine ZR1. Watch the moment a genuine gamble launched what’s become America’s longest-running sports car nameplate.
Pontiac built the first Firebird in barely six months after General Motors killed its pitch for a genuine two-seat sports car, borrowing GTO taillights and a shared Camaro platform to hit showrooms by February 1967. Four completely different engines, from a mild inline-six to a 400-cubic-inch V8 pulled from the GTO, all wore the same sheet metal, and only 697 of the ultra-rare 1969 Trans Am package were ever built. Read on to find out which engines actually made this car a legend.
A Camaro RS met a supercharged, 1,000-horsepower Corvette in a roll race, and the one-word title says how it went. This piece breaks down why the horsepower math almost never favors the RS in matchups like this, what it actually costs to push a Corvette to four-digit power, and why grudge races like this one have become such a fixture of car meet culture.
David Zuber brought his supercharged 1965 Chevrolet El Camino to the Cleveland Auto Show, and the new metal on the floor barely got a glance from him. The El Camino’s story runs from a short-lived 1959 debut on Chevrolet’s full-size platform to a Chevelle-based reinvention that turned it into a genuine muscle car in a truck’s clothing. Its factory engine lineup topped out well below what Zuber’s build produces today. Read on to find out what it takes to push a 1965 coupe-utility into 900-horsepower territory.
Fifty years is long enough for a car to outlive the reasons someone parked it in the first place. This 1961 Corvette finally rolled back into daylight after five decades in storage, and the timing matters: 1961 was the last year Chevrolet built the Corvette exclusively around the 283 small-block, including a rare fuel-injected option. Here’s what makes a survivor like this one worth a second look.
Fourteen years before muscle cars ruled American roads, Chevrolet was already borrowing parts suppliers from the Corvette line to build a pickup that looked like nothing else on a job site. The Cameo Carrier used fiberglass to hide a stepside bed and invented an entire category in the process. This resto-modded 1957 example carries a modern driveline underneath, and the truck’s real history is more surprising than the smooth flanks suggest.
This 1947 Mercury started life as Ford’s answer to a price gap between its own lineup and Lincoln — a modestly powered flathead V8 coupe built for buyers who wanted more than a Ford without paying for a Lincoln. Decades later, this restomod swaps that original 100-horsepower flathead for a Corvette-sourced LT1, proving the body’s lines were worth preserving long after the original mission Mercury built it for had faded.
A 1965 Corvette running the hydraulic-lifter L79 327 takes on a 1970 Camaro Z28 and its solid-lifter LT1 350 in a straight quarter-mile shootout from Road Test TV. Five years apart, these two small blocks represent very different approaches to making power, and viewers are split on which one deserves more respect. Watch to see which Chevy legend crosses the line first.
A 1960 Corvette built as a tribute to a father’s military aviation career has to walk a narrow line, because too few details and the concept misses while too many turn it into a costume. Underneath the aviation theme sits a model year most casual fans skip right past, one where Chevrolet quietly built a record number of cars and started taking handling as seriously as horsepower. Read on for what makes 1960 the right starting point.
AMC built exactly one two-seat steel-bodied American sports car during the muscle car era, and it wasn’t trying to be subtle about its ambitions. The AMX set 106 world speed and endurance records before its public debut, then backed that up with genuine cornering ability alongside straight-line speed. Read on to see how a three-year model run earned back-to-back engineering awards from the Society of Automotive Engineers.
Two enormous Corvette stories broke at nearly the same moment: credible spy footage of a mid-engine car running with minimal camouflage, and reports that the final front-engine ZR1 was close to being finalized. The Corvette community had to decide which one to argue about first. Read on to find out how both stories eventually resolved, and which side of the argument the results favored.
Ford rushed the original Thunderbird into existence as a direct response to the Chevrolet Corvette, seriously considering names like Apache and P-51 Mustang before settling on a mythical bird at the last minute. The two-seat 1955-56 car outsold the Corvette 23 to 1 and introduced a genuinely inventive hydraulic top-and-trunk system with a few real quirks. Read on to find out what Ford got right, and what still leaked.
Thirty-six years in a Great Plains farm shed will bury a car in dust and obscurity, but for a numbers-matching Corvette it can also mean remarkable preservation. This 1965 Sting Ray coupe came out with its original engine and four-speed still in place and the paperwork to prove it. The real story was never on the surface, it was in the documentation. Read on to find out what separates this car from thousands of ordinary small-block Corvettes.
The C4-generation Corvette had something to prove — and it did, in ways most owners never fully realized. Between 1984 and 1996 it introduced a completely redesigned platform, brought in British firm Lotus Engineering to help build the 375-horsepower ZR-1, and quietly set a 24-hour, 175-mph endurance speed record along the way. A separately built twin-turbo version, the Callaway Sledgehammer, pushed even further, hitting 254.76 mph on a closed track. Read on to find out how an era known for plastic panels and a flawed anti-theft key also became one of the fastest Corvette generations ever built.