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Chevrolet’s Camaro ZL1 1LE gives up nearly sixty horsepower to the Dodge Challenger Hellcat on paper, yet it laps a road course faster than the supercharged Mopar has ever managed. The gap comes down to what each manufacturer actually optimized for – straight-line traction versus corner-carving grip – in a horsepower war that shows no sign of ending. Read on to see how Chevrolet closed the gap without matching the Hellcat’s number.
The shaker hood scoop on a 1969 Mach 1 was not styling. It bolted straight to the air cleaner and fed cold air into a 428 Cobra Jet rated at 335 horsepower, a number almost nobody believed then and nobody believes now. Car Life strapped test gear to one in March 1969 and recorded a 13.90-second quarter mile. Read on to find out what made this specific combination so feared.
Cornerstone Dodge Chrysler Jeep Ram in Elk River, Minnesota gives a full walkaround of a brand-new 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon, the factory drag car that needed its own legal reclassification just to leave the lot on street-legal drag radials. The video runs through the full 15-trim Challenger lineup surrounding it and the details — from the second PCM to the missing exterior badge — that made the Demon unlike anything Dodge had sold before. Watch to see what a genuine Demon allocation looked like in person.
A brand-new, completely stock 2018 Mustang GT heads straight to the strip — break-in period be damned — with the owner’s wife and daughter along for the ride. The 119 mph trap speed on box-stock tires drew immediate praise from viewers, but it’s the family moment at the end, and the years of comments from people rewatching it since, that turned a simple run into something people keep coming back to.
Nelson Bandy spent years trying to buy a 1968 Shelby GT500KR convertible from the young couple who owned it in Lobelville, Tennessee, before finally closing the deal in the summer of 1978. He has driven it so rarely since that it spent the last 30 years hidden inside a pair of storage containers. Read on to find out what makes this one of just 318 GT500KR convertibles built, and why Bandy still cannot decide whether to restore it or just get it running as-is.
Chevrolet built only 201 examples of the 1965 Chevelle Malibu SS Z16, and this Rally Red survivor may be one of an estimated 65 still around today. Under the hood sits the 375-horsepower L37 396, a detuned cousin of the Corvette’s L78, backed by a Muncie four-speed and an options list — tilt wheel, four-speaker stereo, 160-mph speedometer — that reads more like a luxury package than a muscle car spec sheet. One commenter even claims to own car number 40 of the original 201. Watch to see what made the Z16 Chevrolet’s quiet halo car.
This twin-turbo, 406-cubic-inch Chevy Nova had already beaten a Nissan GT-R and a supercharged Camaro on the street when its 800-plus horsepower engine finally gave out. Viewers who know the owner say he built it himself — and that he’s already got two more motors ready to go. Watch what happens in the moments before it lets go.
George Hansen fell for this car’s grille in a 1958 advertisement, a full year before the 1959 Pontiac Bonneville even existed to buy. Decades later he found this Mandalay Red convertible with its factory Tri-Power 389 and finally closed the loop. Lou Costabile caught the full story on “My Car Story” — including a dashboard viewers keep calling straight out of the Jetsons. See what a promise kept for sixty years looks like.
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.
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.
Backspeed Boys set out to build a 650-horsepower LS engine, and by their own account it turned into something closer to a dare than a spec sheet. Viewers who watched it come together compared the assembly to snapping together oversized Legos — until the finished engine made the chassis visibly twist under its own torque during the dyno pull. Built around a forged Eagle rotating assembly and no shortage of machine shop time, this is what happens when a familiar platform gets pushed past its comfortable ceiling.
Hennessey Performance took an already track-focused Camaro ZL1 and pushed it to roughly 1,000 horsepower, building a car aggressive enough to earn the name Exorcist. Forrest’s Auto Reviews got behind the wheel to kick off 2018, delivering an unscripted, iPhone-shot drive that shows exactly what four-figure horsepower feels like in a car that started as GM’s factory flagship. Watch the drive and see why the muscle car era’s comeback is more than nostalgia.
A Shelby GT500 owner claiming roughly 800 horsepower at the wheels decided to call out every Dodge Hellcat he could find for a street race — a bold move given that stock Hellcats already run low-to-mid 11s from the factory. The result did not go the way the callout promised, and the comment section made sure everyone knew it. Between jokes about losing to sedans and suggestions to call out a Prius next time, this one became less about the race and more about what happens when trash talk meets a stopwatch. Watch to see how it actually played out.
Ford named its most famous racing engine after a number that was not even accurate. The block actually displaced 425.98 cubic inches, but the sanctioning bodies had set 427 as the ceiling, so Ford built to the limit and rounded up. That engine went on to win Le Mans outright, get one variant banned from NASCAR before it could race, and become the most valuable set of casting numbers in the Ford world. Here is why it still matters.
A V8-powered chainsaw sounds like the kind of thing only a muscle car fanatic would build in a garage — until you learn the record for cutting speed belongs to a company on the other side of the world. From a 508-pound Buick-powered monster nicknamed ‘The Predator’ to an Australian saw built purely for marketing, these builds prove a V8 will make anything sound like it belongs on a drag strip.