Muscle Car Fan

Posts Tagged: HP

V8TV marked the Camaro’s 50th anniversary in 2017 by pulling a genuinely rare example out of the private Brothers Collection: a Granada Gold 1967 Camaro SS396 convertible carrying the top 375-horsepower engine option. Every layer of specification, body style, engine output, and color, makes this a harder car to find than a standard SS396. See exactly what earned it an episode of Muscle Car of the Week.

Pontiac named its most famous option package after a punchline from a late-sixties sketch comedy show, and it worked well enough that the name outlived the company. Line a 1969 GTO Judge with the 366-horsepower Ram Air III against a custom 2006 GTO running a twin-turbo LS2 at roughly 750 horsepower and you have two cars wearing the same badge and chasing the same reputation by completely opposite methods. Read on to find out which approach actually holds up.

A 1969 GTO Ram Air IV, one of only 759 built that year, takes on a 1970 Chevelle SS454 LS6, Chevrolet’s most powerful factory big block of the era, in a quarter-mile pass that ends in a burnout as memorable as the race itself. An original LS6 owner in the comments confirms the car’s biggest weakness was never power, it was getting that much torque to the pavement. The Ram Air IV gives up 80 horsepower on paper but does not give up the fight. Watch the full run to see how it closes the gap.

Dodge shipped the 2015 Charger SRT Hellcat with two key fobs, and only one of them unlocked the full 707 horsepower under the hood. Behind that party trick was a four-door sedan capable of an NHRA-certified 11.0-second quarter mile and a 204 mph top speed, numbers no family car had any business posting. Read on to find out how a practical sedan ended up rewriting the rulebook for what a four-door could be.

This 1969 Camaro already looked finished when its new owner bought it: fresh silver paint, red leather interior, professional build quality throughout. Then he found out what was actually sitting under that hood, and decided a freshly completed car wasn’t nearly finished enough. What came next involved a 540 cubic inch big block, a six-speed manual, and a shop that specializes in exactly this kind of relentless refinement.

Jamboolio’s 2018 muscle car sound reel skips the reviews and interviews entirely, letting eight cars speak for themselves — from a nitrous-fed 1,000-horsepower 1967 Camaro to a supercharged 572 Hemi Challenger. It is pure cold-start-to-redline audio, the kind that racked up more than 4.4 million views without a single word of narration. Viewers call it the best kind of white noise. Watch to hear what all the fuss is about.

This 1973 Dodge Charger wears its Rallye stripes and hood pins like a well-kept survivor, but under the hood sits a custom 605 cubic inch big block claimed to make 805 horsepower. A stock ’73 Rallye topped out around 280 horsepower from its 440 Magnum, so nearly everything about this car’s performance belongs to a different era of engine building. Read on to find out how much of it is still 1973, and what it takes to make an old B-body carry that much power.

A heavily tuned Corvette ZR1 lined up against two of Mercedes-AMG’s most respected performance coupes on a Russian drag strip, and the numbers alone couldn’t predict who’d win. Years after DragTimes filmed the matchup, the comment section is still arguing about reaction times, tuning philosophy, and whether an American small-block had any business beating two AMG builds in one afternoon. Watch to see how close it actually was.

Every 1970 Chevelle SS 396 badge tells a small lie, and the parenthetical in this convertible’s own description gives it away. The 396 that year was really a 402, bored out for reasons that had nothing to do with power, and Chevrolet kept the old emblem anyway. This 350-horsepower drop-top adds bucket seats, tilt wheel, air conditioning, and a power top to the story. Read on to find out why the badge and the engine stopped matching.

This 1969 Dodge Charger R/T pairs the factory-rated 425-horsepower 426 Hemi with a rare 3-speed automatic transmission, a combination found in only a few hundred of the more than 20,000 Charger R/Ts built that year. Part of the Brothers Collection, it carries just over 50,000 original miles. Watch to see what made this specific combination so unusual.

The 1969-and-a-half Plymouth Road Runner A12 was Plymouth’s answer for buyers who wanted Hemi-level violence without the Hemi-sized invoice: a 440 wearing three two-barrel carburetors, a lift-off fiberglass hood, black steel wheels with no hubcaps, and an advertised 390 horsepower. Built for only part of one model year, it remains one of the rarest and most purposeful factory big-block packages of the muscle car era. Read on to find out how Plymouth built a strip car on a budget.

Rumors chasing the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon’s horsepower figure climbed past 900 before SRT’s engineers had finished their own testing. When the official SAE-certified rating finally landed, it told a different story, one backed by an NHRA-certified quarter-mile instead of forum speculation. Read on for what the real number turned out to be, why the rumor overshot, and why the certified figure ended up being the better story.

A 1972 Plymouth GTX and Road Runner running a modified 318 small block, re-sleeved to accept 340 pistons, takes on a 1994 Impala SS riding on chrome 20s and a factory 260-horsepower LT1. Comments from nearly two decades of viewers confirm the budget build held up long after the cameras stopped rolling. Watch to see why the Impala’s driver stopped smiling by the end of the run.

RamblinAround tracks down one of only 503 original 1969 Dodge Charger Daytonas ever built, still running its factory 440 V8 and finished in correct T5 Copper paint. The Daytona’s nose cone and rear wing were built to break NASCAR speed records, and did, forcing the sport to change its rules. Watch to see the winged Mopar that inspired decades of dream-car regret in the comments.

Built by Griffey’s Hot Rods and Restorations, the 1950 Cadillac Series 62 street rod known as LOTACAD lays low to the ground, wears chrome on chrome, carries a full custom interior by Steve Holcomb of Pro Auto Custom Interiors, and hides a modern 6.2-liter V8 making a little over 500 horsepower where Cadillac’s original 331 once lived. It can be naughty or nice, as its builders put it. Read on to see how far this build pushed past Cadillac’s 1950 engineering.

Scroll To Top