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Posts Tagged: Detroit

In 2017, the final model year for the Dodge Viper, driver Dominik Farnbacher took the track-focused ACR-Extreme around the Nurburgring Nordschleife and posted an official lap of 7:03.45, one of the fastest times ever recorded by a car under $400,000. No turbo, no hybrid assist, just a naturally aspirated V10 and a manual gearbox. Watch the full lap that closed out the Viper’s legacy.

Buick’s 1958 Roadmaster was the division’s flagship in its final year under that name, a 219-inch statement car with a 364 “Nailhead” V8 making 300 horsepower and 400 lb-ft. Behind it sat Flight Pitch Dynaflow, a triple-turbine automatic with variable-pitch stator blades that changed its own gearing continuously. Only 14,054 Series 75 cars were built. Read on to find out why a Denver-to-Detroit run is exactly what it was engineered for.

Ron Reolfi’s 1968 Chevrolet Camaro disappeared from outside his North Canton, Ohio workplace in twenty minutes back in 1981 — and stayed gone for 33 years. The reason it eventually came back has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with a title that never legally changed hands. Watch the full story of how a decades-old paperwork trail reunited a man with the car he never stopped losing.

Gar Robinson beat former Indy Lights champion Rafa Matos in a two-lap shootout to win the Trans Am Muscle Car Challenge TA2 race at Belle Isle in Detroit. The victory closed out a chase his father George had started at the same event back in 1988. Camaros, a Mustang, and a Challenger filled the top four spots, which is exactly the kind of finish TA2 was built to produce.

Before it was restored to street legal condition, this 1969 Plymouth Road Runner ran the Detroit-area drag strips as Agent Orange and built a local reputation on wheelies. Underneath the drag history sits the highest-production year the Road Runner ever had, during the stretch when Plymouth’s stripped-down bargain muscle car was collecting awards. Read on to find out how a no-frills price leader ended up outselling everything around it.

A rare 1970 Chevelle SS396 convertible sat parked for decades after being bought new in the Detroit area, and when Patrick Glenn Nichols finally tracked it down in 2017, its odometer became the most argued-over detail in the whole story. Commenters point to worn pedals and a rusted-out SS emblem as evidence the real mileage, and the real history, do not match the dash. See what the wear pattern actually reveals.

The 1949 Hudson Super Six hid a genuinely clever piece of engineering under its conservative styling: a lowered unibody shell mounted over a reinforced ladder frame, dropping the cabin floor below the frame rails for a lower center of gravity than most full-size American cars offered. Hudson called it Step-Down construction, and it gave the Super Six handling that outclassed rivals from Buick and Chrysler. Nearly 100,000 were built in 1949 alone — one of the more underappreciated engineering stories in postwar Detroit.

Arnold Boris has owned this Trumpet Gold 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado since 2012, and its 40,000 original miles show in every panel. What makes it special isn’t just the paint — it’s the chain-driven front-wheel-drive system Oldsmobile hadn’t attempted since the 1930s, paired with a 425 cubic-inch V8 that could reportedly out-accelerate contemporary muscle cars. See why this design still stops people in their tracks nearly six decades later.

In 2016, a panel of 17 women from 14 countries named the Ford Mustang their Women’s Performance Car of the Year, with the Ford Focus RS finishing a close second. The honor pushed back on decades of man’s-car marketing built around the Mustang, while the rest of the muscle car world kept moving too — Classic Performance Products modernized vintage handling, Mopar rolled out new support for grassroots NHRA Sportsman racers, and Hellcat-themed toys sold out before Christmas. Read on for the full roundup of what was happening across the muscle car world that year.

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.

Tom’s one-day transformation of a 1974 Volkswagen Beetle didn’t just change the way the car looks — it started an argument in the comments before the video even hit widescreen. Between a debated wheel swap, a safety tip about a badly placed fuel filter, and a soundtrack that reduced multiple viewers to tears for reasons that had nothing to do with the car, this quick build turned into something bigger than a Saturday project. Watch to see what a single afternoon and the right set of wheels can actually do.

A 1969 Camaro Pro Street build from jeprostreets swaps the usual Roots blower for a screw-type PSI supercharger, runs electronic fuel injection instead of a carburetor, and stacks nitrous on top for good measure. The builder answers technical questions directly in the comments, but hasn’t yet shown the car making a pull. See the setup that has viewers asking about tuning, not just horsepower.

The man who shaped the 1968 Dodge Charger sculpted the design between official assignments, in clay, as something closer to a personal project than a sanctioned program. It became one of the most recognizable American cars ever built, and he left Detroit shortly afterward without ever styling another production vehicle. Decades later, builders are still reinterpreting his lines in Pro Street form, which is its own kind of credit.

In September 1985, a group of Mopar owners drove in convoy from Detroit to a car show in Columbus, Ohio — and somewhere on I-75, a Plymouth Superbird and a Cuda ended up racing side by side, countdown called over CB radio. Both cars are still owned by the same two friends today, now transformed into a Sox & Martin tribute build and a Hemi-powered Cuda. The story behind that afternoon is better than the race itself.

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