Posts Tagged: Gateway Classic Cars
This 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder replica recreates the car James Dean was driving when he died, using a VW-based 1915cc flat-four instead of Porsche’s original race-bred engine. Here is the real history behind Porsche’s first purpose-built race car and the legend surrounding the original Little Bastard.
The Lamborghini Gallardo became the brands best-selling model ever, with over 14,000 built between 2003 and 2013, by offering something Lamborghini rarely had: real usability. This 2004 examples 500-horsepower V10 and dual-transmission choice show exactly why. Here are the numbers behind the car that redefined what a Lamborghini could be.
Plymouth’s answer to the Ford Mustang did not just need to look sporty; it needed to earn the title, and the 1965 Formula S package was how it happened. A 235 horsepower Commando V8 paired with upgraded suspension and a factory tachometer turned an ordinary Barracuda into a genuine performer. Fewer than three thousand buyers ordered it that year, so why did the option that made the car worth having stay so rare?
In 1976, a heavily built 1967 Plymouth Barracuda Formula S with a 383 big block got its doors blown off on Gratiot Avenue — by a full-size Pontiac most street racers wouldn’t have recognized. The culprit was a rare 1966 Pontiac 2+2 running a 421 tri-power engine rated at 376 horsepower, a model Pontiac once marketed as the GTO’s big brother. Read on to see how one of the rarest Pontiacs of the 1960s humbled a genuinely fast Mopar.
In 1916, Willys-Overland was Americas second-largest automaker behind only Ford, and this Model 86 was its answer to what a flagship car could be: a seven-passenger, 45-horsepower luxury tourer loaded with then-modern features. It only lasted one model year. Heres why Overland built it, and why it disappeared just as fast.
Long before Ford or Chevrolet dominated American roads, a small Michigan company was already outproducing nearly every rival combined with a simple, curved-dash runabout that most people today have never heard of. Oldsmobile’s early embrace of assembly-line manufacturing and aggressive pricing let it claim a commanding share of the entire U.S. auto market by 1903. Here is how one inexpensive little car built the template every automaker since has followed.
Most 1969 Chevelle SS cars left the factory with a 396 under the hood, the engine the SS package was built around that year. An LT1-badged 350, a designation usually reserved for Corvettes and Camaro Z/28s, tells a different story entirely. Chevrolet built over 86,000 Chevelle SS cars in 1969, including a tiny handful of factory-ordered secrets, like the rare COPO 427, most buyers never knew existed.
Plymouth’s first all-new postwar design wasn’t fast, flashy, or memorable — which is exactly why a stock-looking 1950 Deluxe is harder to spot today than most muscle cars. This example keeps that deliberately plain exterior while hiding a 350 small-block and automatic transmission underneath, along with power steering, power brakes, and vintage-style air conditioning. It’s the kind of sleeper nobody notices until the engine turns over. Here’s how Plymouth’s most forgettable postwar sedan became one.
Ford’s 1934 Model 40 was cheap, practical transportation for a country climbing out of the Depression — not a performance car. Somehow it became the chassis hot rodders have chased for nearly a century. This burnt-orange build trades the original flathead V8 for a 350 small-block, air suspension, and a fully custom leather interior while keeping the shape that started it all. Here’s why this humble Ford still turns heads at every show it enters.
Plymouth sold the Fury in three trim levels sharing one C-body platform, with the Fury III positioned as the upscale, best-equipped version of the bunch. Most buyers chose comfort over speed, which makes this 383 cubic inch, 4-speed manual example a genuinely uncommon way to order a car built primarily to coddle its passengers.
The 1974 Pontiac Grand Prix arrived just as the muscle car era was winding down, wearing a federally mandated 5-mph bumper and an emissions-strangled 400-cubic-inch V8 that made noticeably less power than earlier versions. Pontiac leaned into comfort and styling instead, and buyers responded: despite the power cuts, nearly 100,000 Grand Prixs sold that year. It remains one of the clearer snapshots of how regulation reshaped Detroit’s performance cars almost overnight.
By 1970, Chevrolet let El Camino SS buyers order the same 454-cubic-inch big block that powered the fastest Chevelles, including a 450-horsepower LS6 option good for a 13.44-second quarter mile. This example carries the SS package and a big-block V8 backed by a Turbo Hydra-Matic 400 transmission. Chevrolet built only around 500 El Camino SS 454s that year, making a documented big-block example a genuinely rare way to combine a cargo bed with serious factory horsepower.
Long before this restomod’s ceramic headers and chrome mags, the 1932 Ford roadster had already become the battleground for hot rodding’s biggest debate: Ford body, Chevy heart. Once the small-block Chevy V8 proved itself in the mid-1950s, legendary builds swapped out their Ford flatheads, and this build carries that same tradition forward.
This 1965 Chevy II carries the most basic drivetrain Chevrolet offered that year: a 194-cubic-inch inline six paired with a 2-speed automatic. The same platform, though, could be ordered with a 283-cubic-inch V8 making up to 225 horsepower, or as the sportier Nova Super Sport coupe. Chevrolet built the Chevy II fast and cheap to answer the Ford Falcon and Plymouth Valiant, moving 122,800 of them in 1965 alone across a lineup that ranged from grocery-getter to genuine performance car.