 |
During the final round of the Stick Shift class at I-29 No Prep in 2017, the Unicorn C5 Corvette — finally dialed in after a round of suspension and tire changes — caught fire mid-pass when a loose injector o-ring sprayed fuel onto the engine bay. A competing Subaru driver’s fast thinking with a fire extinguisher kept real damage to a minimum, and 1320video walks through exactly what went wrong and why. The car lived to race another day. Watch to see how close it came to not.
A Novato homeowner was doing what countless classic car owners do on a weekend — trying to coax a long-dormant engine back to life in his garage. A strange chemical smell on the first attempt should have been a warning sign. Instead, a second try on the ignition ended in an engine bay explosion, a spreading hillside fire, and a two-alarm response from local firefighters. Here’s what actually happened, and why old muscle cars carry this exact risk.
Chevrolet’s 2015 Camaro Z/28 borrowed its 505-horsepower LS7 engine straight from the Corvette Z06 parts bin, then wrapped it in a chassis stripped, stiffened, and fitted with racing-grade Multimatic dampers built for one job: lap times. Priced at a flat $75,000 and offered exclusively with a manual transmission, it reportedly posted a 7:37 Nurburgring lap that embarrassed cars costing twice as much. Read on to find out what it actually took to build the fastest Camaro of its generation.
A high schooler in 1964 who never forgot the sound of an identical car lighting up his street. An Air Force veteran turned away by dealers who wouldn’t sell him one. A rumored history running moonshine through the Georgia mountains. V8TV’s Muscle Car of the Week tracked down a Raven black 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 packing the rare R-code 427 rated at 425 horsepower and a 4-speed manual. What was actually bolted under that unassuming black hood?
The Camaro was born as Chevy’s rushed answer to the Ford Mustang, rolling off the line months ahead of schedule just to compete. Fifty years, six generations, and more than five million cars later, it has become an American institution in its own right. Here’s how Chevrolet marked the milestone, and how a car built to catch up ended up setting the pace.
Henry Ford quietly built at least eight boats in the early 1920s, and the last survivor, named Evangeline, carried a 450-horsepower V12 engine repurposed from a World War I fighter plane. It reportedly hit 49 mph in 1924, fast enough to outrun dedicated race boats of the day, before a fire at the Gold Cup ended Ford’s interest in racing on water for good.
Dodge spent months teasing the 2018 Challenger SRT Demon without showing a single performance number, leaning instead on the idea that cold, dense air is what really makes a muscle car. When the specs finally landed, they made the teasing look modest: 840 horsepower, a 9.65-second quarter mile, a factory transbrake, an air conditioner repurposed to chill the intake, and a Guinness record for lifting the front wheels off the ground.
An all-wheel-drive Audi S2 running a Precision 6466 turbocharger on a 2.2-liter five-cylinder against a nitrous-fed Chevelle leaning on cubic inches is one of the oldest arguments in street racing, staged in metal. Turbo versus nitrous, import versus muscle, four driven wheels versus two. The horsepower numbers are only half the story. Read on to find out which factor usually decides it.
Builder Steve Strope calls it his cancer, only half joking, and the Mustang fastback he built to answer one strange question proves the obsession was worth it: what if Ford and Martini Racing had actually partnered up? Powered by a motor descended from Ford’s 1960s Lotus Indy Car program and wrapped in one of motorsport’s most iconic liveries, this build rewards close inspection. Watch to see the details fans are still finding.
A five-car rundown of the least dependable vehicles ever built pairs a push-bar Ford Taurus with a Dodge Neon SRT-4 caught on fire and a Mitsubishi Evo broken down roadside, and the reasons behind each failure are more specific than the title lets on. The comments section turns into its own debate, with viewers arguing over Dodge’s reliability reputation since its Fiat ownership and trading stories of five-figure repair bills. Watch the full breakdown and see which car actually deserved its spot.
This 1978 Pontiac Trans Am rolled into V8 Speed & Resto Shop running like anything but a bird of fire — and rolled out with a FAST EZ-EFI fuel injection system, a 2004R overdrive transmission, and a COMP Cams roller valvetrain under its Pontiac 400. The upgrades are the kind Pontiac purists argue about for hours. See exactly what changed and why the team made each call.
A 1967 Mustang Fastback with a dyno-verified 370-horsepower 302 sounds like a straightforward resto-mod until you realize Ford did not build a 302 until 1968. That single detail explains the entire philosophy behind this build, and it raises the question every resto-mod eventually has to answer: at what point does a modernized classic stop being the car it started as? Here is what the 1967 Fastback platform gives a builder, and what it asks in return.
A car left parked directly in front of a fire hydrant became the subject of a full CNN segment after firefighters responded in the most theatrical way possible. Correspondent Jeanne Moos turns the moment into a lesson on why hydrant clearance rules exist — and what a professional-grade hose can do to an unattended vehicle. The clip has quietly racked up nearly four million views. Watch to see exactly what was waiting for the driver when they got back.
A decade-old burnout compilation still pulls in fresh comments year after year, and the reason is buried in the details viewers keep pointing out: a Neon’s blown motor, a clutch that lets go loud enough to hear before you see it, a truck riding on hydraulics nobody mentioned in the description. Watch to see which clip earns its own line of commentary.