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Sixty years ago, this 1964 Rambler American was AMC’s best-selling answer to the compact wars — thrifty, practical, and about as far from a muscle car as Kenosha built that year. Somewhere along the way it picked up a 350 small-block and a 700R4 overdrive automatic, and now it’s a sleeper most people never see coming.
1958 was the year the Corvette finally turned a profit for GM — 9,168 built, a 47-percent sales jump, quad headlights and a washboard hood, and a 283 small-block offered in five states of tune topping out at a fuel-injected 290 hp. It wasn’t a facelift, it was the year America’s sports car proved it belonged.
This 1936 Chevrolet pickup started life with a modest inline-six and three-speed manual, part of a lineup that introduced hydraulic brakes and an all-steel cab that year. Somewhere along the way it was reborn with a 383 small-block V8 and a Turbo 350 automatic. The swap turns a Depression-era work truck into a driver capable of keeping up with modern traffic.
This 1986 Zimmer Quicksilver started life as an ordinary Pontiac Fiero GT before the factory cut it apart and stretched it into a neoclassic luxury coupe. Buyers paid nearly four times the Fiero’s price for the transformation, and only 170 were ever built. See what a former GM designer did with 29 inches of added sheet metal and a 140-horsepower V6.
Chrysler’s Cordoba became a sales phenomenon on the strength of five words spoken by Ricardo Montalban: ‘rich, Corinthian leather.’ The leather was actually made in Newark, New Jersey, but the name stuck anyway. For 1976, Chrysler bumped the standard V8 to 400 cubic inches, upgraded the brakes, and kept doors so long – 58.5 inches – that they remain some of the biggest ever fitted to a production car. Sales climbed to roughly 165,000 units, propping up a company that badly needed a hit.
Triumph”s Spitfire entered its final years in 1979 wrapped in federally mandated rubber bumpers and running a larger, torquier but noticeably less reliable engine than the roadster that debuted back in 1962. Tightening regulations and cheaper Japanese imports were closing in fast on the entire British sports car segment. Read on to find out what changed under the skin of the last Spitfires, and why the nameplate still has such a devoted following.