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Dodge built the 1968 Dart GTS around a 340 small block, offered a 383 to buyers who wanted more, and flatly refused to put a 440 in the car on its own assembly line. Roughly fifty of them got one anyway, through an outside shop working under Dodge supervision. A clean, documented example is one of the harder cars in the Mopar world to verify. Read on for what to check before you believe the ad copy.
Dodge’s engineers found a strange use for the Demon’s air conditioning system – one that has nothing to do with keeping the cabin cool and everything to do with chasing quarter-mile elapsed times. Jason Fenske breaks down the SRT Power Chiller and After-Run Chiller in exact numbers, down to the degrees Fahrenheit they shave off intake air. It’s the kind of detail hiding in plain sight on a factory spec sheet.
Every horsepower figure printed on a 1960s muscle car brochure was a negotiation between engineering and marketing, and both sides cheated. Some engines were inflated on paper to win showroom arguments. Others were deliberately understated to slip past insurance underwriters and racing sanctioning bodies. Sorting out which classic muscle cars actually made the most power means throwing out the window sticker entirely and looking at what these engines really did. Read on to find out which numbers hold up.
The 2017 Dodge Charger Daytona 392 runs the quarter mile in the mid-twelves with room for four adults and a week of groceries. Its 6.4-liter HEMI makes 485 horsepower and 475 lb-ft, wrapped in satin black graphics borrowed from the supercharged Hellcat but priced well below it. It is the last of a breed that Detroit has now stopped building. Read on for what the 392 package actually adds, and where that Daytona badge came from.
Every muscle car engine gets the glory, but horsepower means nothing until it reaches the pavement through the transmission standing between the crankshaft and the rear wheels. An animated breakdown of exactly how that transmission works, dog clutches, synchronizer rings, and all, earned praise from a self-identified automotive engineer as the clearest explanation they had ever seen. It even required its own creator to issue a correction. Watch to see what most drivers get wrong about their own gearbox.
Is the naturally aspirated Corvette Grand Sport really a cut-rate imitation of the supercharged Z06, or is it a legitimate performance variant in its own right? This side-by-side breaks down what the two C7 Corvettes actually share and where they genuinely differ under the skin. See which one actually makes more sense for the money.
This meme swaps a real astronomy lesson for a joke about exhaust smoke standing in for clouds, using the classic ‘look son’ format recycled across the internet for years. The punchline is rooted in a real mechanical fact: older carbureted big-blocks tuned rich for performance genuinely produced visible smoke under hard acceleration, something today’s computer-controlled engines almost never do. Read on to find out why this exact joke keeps resurfacing across muscle car pages, generation after generation.
The Beach Boys wrote a hit song about a number, and that number was an engine. Chevrolet’s 409 started as a bored-out truck motor, went into just 142 cars before production problems shut the option down, then came back to become one of the most obsessed-over powerplants of the muscle car era. Only 43,775 cars ever received one across its entire run, and the strongest versions made 425 horsepower. Read on for how a stalled-out truck engine became a household name.
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.
This unassuming blue AMC hides a genuinely serious secret under its hood, and the numbers involved tend to surprise anyone who assumes AMC could never compete in the muscle car horsepower wars. The factory-rated 401 V8 shares its strongest components with engines drag racers now push well past 700 horsepower. Read on to find out just how far AMC”s forged-steel foundation can be pushed.
A 5,300-pound SUV hitting 60 mph in the time it takes to read this sentence sounds like a typo, but Patrick Rall’s in-car footage of a 2018 Jeep Grand Cherokee Trackhawk running its Launch Control system proves the number is real. Two runs, two nearly identical times, and a supercharged engine borrowed straight from a Hellcat explain how a family hauler ended up embarrassing sports cars at stoplights.
Two of America’s most iconic nameplates went head-to-head in 2015, and for once the numbers were close enough that bragging rights actually meant something. The Mustang GT and Camaro SS both packed around 430 horsepower and the most aggressive handling packages either brand offered that year. Read on to find out which pony car actually came out ahead once the spec sheets stopped mattering.