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The 2016 SEMA Show settled an old argument when the Ford Mustang was voted Hottest Coupe over Chevrolet’s Camaro, even though Chevy brought the bigger display. But the car that actually stole attention that year wasn’t from either factory — it was a privateer rally driver’s twin-turbo 1965 Mustang making more than 1,400 horsepower. Here’s what happened at the show that’s still a reference point for builders a decade later.
Muscle At The Strip, formerly Mopars At The Strip, brought the Mopar Muscle Scat Pack Challenge and Hellcat Shootout to The Strip At Las Vegas on April 21 through 23, 2017, splitting the field between 392 Apache Hemi cars and 707-horsepower supercharged Hellcats. Both brackets went to manual-transmission cars, an upset in classes the eight-speed automatics usually dominate. Read on to find out how the stick shifts pulled it off.
Las Vegas is not just one of the best cities for classic car enthusiasts by reputation – it is backed up by real numbers, hosting the SEMA Show’s roughly 160,000 attendees and 2,200 exhibitors every year since 1977. Combined with St. Louis, Sacramento, and Miami’s own car cultures, this list reveals what really makes a city a haven for enthusiasts: infrastructure, climate, and a packed events calendar.
A custom shop barely a year and a half old rolled four vehicles onto the SEMA 2016 floor, including a Plymouth ‘Cuda wearing a full carbon-fiber body built from parts customers could actually buy. That wasn’t the only rule getting rewritten that year — Dodge introduced the first all-wheel-drive American muscle car, and one shop found a way to add twin turbochargers on top of an already-supercharged Hellcat engine. Read on to find out how far builders were willing to push the muscle car formula.
A stroked LS3 and a ten-mile traffic jam near the California-Nevada line were all it took to strand Project Orange Krate, the Chevy High Performance 1971 Camaro, on the shoulder of Interstate 15 after the 2017 Holley LS Fest West. With Vette and Street Rodder editor Brian Brennan in the passenger seat and no working fuel gauge, it became a lesson every pro-touring builder eventually learns: horsepower changes your fuel math more than you think.
Mike and Jim Ring build cars for clients who can afford anything, unveil them to enormous crowds in Las Vegas every November, and then drive home to a Wisconsin town of fewer than two thousand people. The gap between those two facts is the most interesting thing about Ringbrothers. Read on for how a small-town body shop became one of the most recognizable names in the restomod world without ever moving.