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Rory Carroll edits Autoweek from Detroit, but his own car story starts in the orchards of northern Michigan and runs straight through a welded-shut door at the 24 Hours of Lemons. In this conversation with host Pat Caporuscio, Carroll traces his path from a cherry-country childhood to one of the industry’s most recognized editorial chairs, and explains why an editor who still races tells a different kind of story. Read on to find out what shaped his eye for the muscle car world.
Chevrolet already had a Camaro ZL1 that could embarrass six-figure exotics on a road course, so when engineers built a more extreme version they did the unexpected thing and left the 650-horsepower supercharged V8 completely alone. The 2018 ZL1 1LE found roughly three seconds a lap at GM’s Milford Road Course through dampers, tires, downforce, and about sixty pounds of deleted weight instead. From twenty feet away it looks nearly identical to the standard car. It is not.
A 1934 Ford coupe wearing the bones of a wrecked sixth-generation Camaro ZL1 has no business working as well as it does. The donor brought a supercharged 650-horsepower LT4, magnetic dampers, and Brembo brakes to a body shell built when Ford’s best V8 made 85 horsepower. The nickname Road Kill R came from how the parts were sourced. Read on to find out why this particular pairing splits the hot rod world down the middle.
Lokar’s Muscle Car Shifter Knob is built to replicate the look and feel of a factory GM shifter closely enough to fool most people at a car show, and it won SEMA’s award for Best New Interior Accessory Product. The install is straightforward but order-dependent: the shifter has to be in Park, the set screw inside the knob has to stay untouched, and the adapter housing has to be held steady while tightening. Here’s exactly how to avoid the mistakes first-timers usually make.
Ford shipped the EcoBoost Mustang with 310 horsepower, respectable for a turbo four and unremarkable for a Mustang. An Ohio dealership closed that gap with the LFP 550 package, pairing a larger BorgWarner turbo and upgraded intercooler with a VMP-developed tune to claim 550 horsepower for $32,995 out the door. The engine was never opened, and the real cost was not the price. Here is what the package changed and what it cost buyers.
The 1968 Dodge Charger R/T redefined what a Mopar intermediate could look like, trading its predecessor’s slow-selling fastback for the coke-bottle body that later made it famous as the General Lee. Under the hood of this particular car sits the 375-horsepower 440 Magnum wedge — Hemi-adjacent thrust without the Hemi’s finicky tune or price tag. AutoMastersHQ’s in-depth review puts both the styling and the performance to the test.
This 1970 Chevrolet Impala, powered by a 350 small-block paired with a TH350 automatic, hadn’t run since 1993, 23 years of silence before this restart attempt. Using nothing more than a dwell meter, timing light, and decades of hands-on know-how, host Jonathan walks through exactly what it takes to wake up an engine everyone assumed was finished. Watch to hear how it sounds once it finally catches.
A friend’s already-knocking LT1 Camaro gets one last job — doughnuts in a parking lot within view of a police station — before the engine gives out for good. The owner, already building a replacement motor in a machine shop, knew exactly what he was risking. Viewers have kept coming back to laugh at the timing and the location for years. Watch the LT1’s final, dramatic act.
Tom Nelson of Nelson Racing Engines has built some of the most respected high-horsepower LS combinations in the business, and in this Drive feature he spends twenty minutes explaining exactly what makes the platform special — knowledge dense enough that commenters started calling him “Motor Yoda.” One viewer even backed up his points with a 130,000-mile Camaro SS that never missed a beat. Watch to find out what separates a good LS build from a great one.
Enzo Morales took a 1966 Chevrolet Malibu, a trim level Chevrolet never intended to be anything special, and built it into something viewers compare to a Mercedes CL63 or a Bentley Continental GT. The result raises a genuinely odd question: can an American mid-size sedan earn the nickname ‘American Aston Martin’? Watch to see the build, and the burnout, that convinced a crowd of onlookers the answer is yes.
Hagerty’s Redline Rebuild team started with an ordinary 289 cubic-inch V8 pulled from a wrecked 1964 Ford Fairlane, not a fresh crate engine, and set out to build it into something closer to a Shelby GT350 mill. Three months and roughly 40,000 reference photos later, period-correct upgrades pushed output from a stock 195 horsepower to around 310. Watch the full teardown-to-rebuild transformation, compressed into five action-packed minutes.
This 1967 Pontiac GTO started its restoration looking, in one viewer’s words, like it had been dragged out of a swamp — rusted through and barely recognizable. V8 Speed and Resto Shop’s frame-off rebuild brought it back to its factory-correct Tyrol Blue, complete with its original Pontiac 400 four-barrel V8 and every factory comfort option intact, before unveiling it at the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals. Watch the full transformation from swamp find to show winner.
Dodge offered its fearsome Max Wedge 413 across the entire 1962 Dart lineup, station wagons included, pairing a genuinely dangerous big-block with a brand-new lightweight unibody platform. Two states of tune were available, both capable of closing in on a 12-second quarter mile in a car built to also haul groceries. Chryslers engineers proved a mid-size car could out-drag much larger machinery years before the GTO existed. This wagon is a reminder that Mopars muscle car reputation started in unlikely places.
The 1967 Chevrolet Nova SS looked like a mild refresh of Chevrolet’s compact Chevy II, but underneath was a genuine giant-killer: a 350-horsepower 327 V8 available for just $93 more than the base engine. Here’s how the Nova went from economy car to muscle car contender, and what the safety updates of 1967 changed for good.
Shot on a public street during Ocean City, Maryland’s biggest car week, this decade-old clip pits a Chevy S10 against a Camaro in an impromptu street pull that was never part of the official Cruisin’ Ocean City schedule. The self-deprecating title warns you how it turns out before you even press play. Watch to see why over a million people have clicked on a shaky, unbranded phone video anyway.