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Most self-described Mustang fans can name the car on sight, but can they name the fighter plane it’s named after, or the year its horsepower hit an all-time low? This look at pony car trivia digs into the prototype badges, supercharger conversions, and Hollywood cameos that built the Mustang legend, ahead of a quick IQ test to see how much of it you actually knew.
American Motors built the Ambassador as its flagship for eighteen model years, and 1966 was the year the gamble finally paid off, with sales climbing to roughly 71,000 from under 19,000 just two years earlier. The DPL hardtop sat at the very top of that range with reclining buckets and AMC’s largest V8. Here is why an unrestored survivor from a brand this overlooked is genuinely harder to find than a big-name muscle car.
A four-cylinder Mustang sounds like a contradiction, but Ford’s 2.3-liter EcoBoost makes more torque than the V6 it replaced, delivers it 1,600 rpm sooner, and returns 32 mpg on the highway. It also takes weight off the nose and responds to tuning in ways a naturally aspirated engine never could. The compromise is the noise, and it is a real one. Read on for why Ford already tried this once in 1984.
More than 800 cars packed Cobo Center for the 65th annual Detroit Autorama in 2017, one of the most significant gatherings in the hot rod and custom car world. The Ridler Award, reserved for cars debuting for the very first time in public, went to a scratch-built 1933 Ford Roadster running a 427 big block. What else was hiding among 800 cars competing for the hobby’s biggest stage?
The 1966 Fairlane was the year Ford re-engineered the car to accept a big block, and the GT and GTA came standard with a 335-horsepower 390. The difference between the two badges comes down to a single letter and a single component. Convertible production across the whole lineup barely topped 13,000 cars, and the performance versions are a small slice of that. Read on for why this one keeps getting overlooked.
Ford did not build a new engine to make the 1965 Mustang quick. It reached into a completely different car’s parts bin, pulled out an engine that had already been proving itself elsewhere for two years, and charged a serious premium for the privilege. Only a tiny fraction of buyers ever checked the box, and the horsepower figure attached to this car deserves a closer look than it usually gets.
Ford launched the Mustang in China in 2015 as a niche import with expectations of roughly 3,000 sales, and then watched demand climb. The car that got there was the first Mustang ever engineered for worldwide sale, and the version most Chinese buyers chose was the four-cylinder EcoBoost rather than the V8, for reasons that come down to a displacement tax that hits large engines at 40 percent. Read on for how the global strategy reshaped the car.
Rootes Motors built only 7,128 Sunbeam Tigers between three distinct variants, squeezing Ford V8s into a lightweight British roadster that went on to hold the AHRA quarter-mile record for two years. Most of the Tiger’s production crossed the Atlantic to North America, though six went to London’s Metropolitan Police for highway patrol duty. The car’s ending is as strange as its badge: Chrysler bought Rootes in 1964 but had no engine that would fit the Tiger, and production simply stopped once the Ford engine supply ran out. Read on for the full story of Detroit muscle in a British body.
Ford’s F-150 has held the title of best-selling truck in America for more than four decades, a reputation for durability it nearly wrecked with a notorious spark plug flaw in the 2004-2008 Triton V8 generation before course-correcting with a full 2009 redesign. The later switch to military-grade aluminum body panels wasn’t popular at first but paid off in long-term rust resistance. Read on to find out how a truck this beat up is still running at all.
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.
A Chrysler 440 big block living inside a vintage Ford racer is the kind of combination that makes purists twitch and racers grin. This build pairs a hot-tanked and honed RB block with upgraded pistons, a period-correct roll cage, and a carefully sorted carburetor setup. The result sounds nothing like what the badge on the body promises. Read on for why the 440 keeps ending up in cars Chrysler never built.
Ford built the FE 427 Cammer to solve one problem: Chrysler’s 426 Hemi was dominating NASCAR, and a conventional block wasn’t going to catch it. The side-oiler engine replaced a normal camshaft with an idler shaft and a six-foot timing chain driving twin overhead cams, hollow sodium-filled exhaust valves, and a hemispherical combustion chamber Ford couldn’t even call a Hemi because Chrysler owned the name. Sold as a crate engine in 1968, the dual-carb version made 657 horsepower for $2,350. Read on for how Ford’s FE family evolved from Mercury’s 410 to this NASCAR-killer.
Shot at the historic Raceway Park in Englishtown, New Jersey, this amateur upload from daredevil7442 captures a lineup of Hemi and big-block Mopar muscle running the quarter mile at one of the East Coast’s most storied drag strips. It’s grassroots drag racing rather than a professional NHRA broadcast, but the track underneath these cars has hosted some of the sport’s biggest names for decades. Watch to see American muscle running down a strip with genuine drag racing pedigree.
American muscle cars didn’t die from a single law. Insurance surcharges, emissions rules that cut a 450-horsepower Chevelle engine down to 200 horsepower, and the 1973 oil crisis all hit within a few years of each other. The 1980s comeback cars, like the 302 Mustang and third-gen Camaro, were built for survival, not revival. Read on for how the technology that actually solved the problem didn’t show up for another fifteen years, and why today’s 700-horsepower factory V8s owe more to those lean years than most enthusiasts realize.
Legend holds that Carroll Shelby trademarked the ‘King of the Road’ name in a hurry after hearing Chevrolet wanted it for a Corvette — securing it for his new 428 Cobra Jet-powered Mustang instead. Shelby built the GT500KR for barely two months in 1968, producing just 1,053 fastbacks and 517 convertibles — 1,570 cars total. Independent road tests of the era clocked it at 5.4 seconds to 60 mph, numbers that placed it among the quickest American cars you could buy.