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This photo captures one of NASCAR’s rarest creations: a genuine wing car from the sport’s brief but wild ‘aero wars.’ Built by Dodge and Plymouth to chase top speed with towering rear wings and extended nosecones, cars like this one dominated the 1970 season before a single rule change legislated them out of competition almost overnight. Read on to find out why that rule mattered so much, and why surviving examples are worth seven figures today.
Lee Iacocca took over Ford’s day-to-day operations determined to give buyers more reasons to visit a showroom, and the 1962-1963 Thunderbird Sports Roadster was part of that push — complete with wire wheels borrowed straight from genuine sports cars, a fiberglass tonneau cover, and an ultra-rare 345-horsepower Tri-Power engine option that lasted barely a year and a half. It also involved Elvis Presley, a collapsing wire wheel, and a name change that almost happened but didn’t. Read on to find out how it all fit together.
Forty-two years after the original Boss 302 was built to win a Trans-Am race, Ford brought the name back with one very specific goal: beat a BMW M3 around Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. Around the same time, Chevrolet revived the ZL1 badge — a name that started with one Illinois dealer’s odd request for fifty aluminum-block Camaros — on a supercharged, 550-plus horsepower Camaro built using suspension technology borrowed from the Corvette ZR1. Read on to find out how two of Detroit’s oldest names ended up chasing the same import.
A 1970 Ford F-100 Ranger XLT was built to be the comfortable one, the half ton pickup for buyers who wanted brightwork and better seats on top of hauling capability. So a 428 Cobra Jet badge on the fender raises an immediate question, because Ford never offered that engine in a truck. Here is why the swap works so cleanly, what the Cobra Jet actually produced, and why this generation of F-Series became such fertile ground for sleeper builds.
Twelve of the world’s best driver’s cars line up on an airstrip for MotorTrend’s sixth drag race showdown – and then an uninvited Dodge Charger Hellcat, parked nearby for entirely unrelated reasons, ends up joining the field anyway. The results surprise viewers more than the official lineup does. Watch to see which cars actually back up their reputations.
In 1955 Chevrolet and Ford both launched a two-seat American convertible, and only one of them was seriously trying to build a sports car. The Thunderbird outsold the Corvette by better than twenty to one in the first year alone, which should have ended the argument permanently. Instead it saved the Corvette. Here is how the softer car won the showroom, why GM refused to read that as a defeat, and what happened to both nameplates afterward.
For the Mustang’s fiftieth anniversary, Ford threw out the playbook: the 2015 car shared no carryover parts with any Mustang before it, introduced an independent rear suspension the nameplate had only used once in its history, and brought back a four-cylinder option for the first time since 1993. It was the moment the pony car stopped being a straight-line specialist and started chasing sports cars. Read on for what changed underneath, and what the solid-axle crowd lost in the process.
A cracked, sun-baked steering wheel is one of the fastest ways to undercut an otherwise correct restoration, and unlike most classic car parts, there’s no factory reproduction sitting on a shelf waiting to be ordered. Instead there’s a small network of specialists — from a Georgia shop that duplicates factory urethane finishes to a Pennsylvania restorer who’s spent decades perfecting wood-rimmed wheels — each with their own approach to bringing a ruined wheel back to something close to new. Read on to find out which one fits your car.
Two red muscle cars sit nose to nose in this photo, a rivalry Detroit spent the 1960s engineering on purpose as GM, Ford, and Chrysler chased the same prize — more horsepower, more magazine covers, and more bragging rights on Main Street. From Pontiac’s GTO to Chrysler’s Road Runner and Ford’s Torino Cobra, each brand built a genuine identity buyers would defend like a hometown team. Read on to find out how that engineered rivalry turned into a real muscle car war.
A homemade video shot at a small Michigan dragstrip in 2001 captures something the big-budget car shows almost never do: what grassroots Mopar racing actually looked like when nobody was performing for a camera crew. Pat Muscle Car Fan’s footage from Ubly Dragstrip is a time capsule of a scene that shaped how an entire generation of Mopar owners learned to race.