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AV Boys’ small-block Mustang gave a built, turbocharged Porsche 911 a full car-length head start in a five-thousand-dollar grudge race — and still caught it with the front wheels off the ground. The clip has circulated for years as proof that a well-built pushrod small-block Ford can embarrass six-figure German engineering. See exactly how close it actually was.
A flyer promising prize money at a March drag shootout doesn’t tell you much on its own — but the track behind it, an NHRA-affiliated eighth-mile strip built for grudge racing and small-tire shootouts, has plenty of story to it. Door-crasher format, cash on the line, and a community that shows up test-and-tune after test-and-tune. Here’s what actually happens when the tree drops and real money’s riding on it.
Before the Pontiac GTO existed, corporate policy at General Motors made it impossible: no mid-size car could carry an engine over 330 cubic inches, period. John DeLorean and a small team of engineers built one anyway, testing it in nighttime street races before their bosses even knew it existed. This archival documentary traces how that quiet act of rule-breaking, plus a name borrowed from Ferrari, turned into the car that saved Pontiac and launched an entire era of American muscle. Watch to find out how close it came to never happening at all.
From the mid-1950s through the 1970s, street racers ruled the boulevard, the drive-in, and the local dragstrip, marking their best times in shoe polish on the windshield for the whole school to see. Crashes, license suspensions, and new laws eventually ended the era, but a surprising number of cars survived, quietly passed down to children and grandchildren who still race them today. Read on to find out where this culture actually played out.
A lime-green Cougar so radically reworked that showgoers assumed it was a new model altogether — that was Mercury’s 1970 El Gato concept, unveiled at back-to-back auto shows before vanishing for good. It borrowed its fastback roofline from a Mustang, swapped its back seat for a European-style cargo shelf, and tested run-flat tire technology that failed spectacularly. Ford’s standard practice of destroying show cars means no one has documented seeing it since 1970. Here’s the story behind Mercury’s strangest concept car.
This Chrysler 300C SRT8 looks like an ordinary full-size sedan and hides a stroked 404-cubic-inch Hemi backed by twin 67mm turbochargers. 1320video caught it running at the Texas Streets, an event built around exactly this kind of mismatch between looks and power. Watch to see it hang with — and upset — cars that looked a lot faster on paper.
The U-2 spy plane cannot land without a car racing alongside it on the runway, radioing the pilot’s altitude down to the final foot — and for decades, that job went to genuine muscle cars pulled into government service. This clip captures the aircraft’s dramatic departure from RAF Fairford, with the very vehicle waiting for its return parked just out of frame. Watch to see what the Air Force trusts with landing a Cold War-era spy plane today.