 |
Mecum’s Kissimmee auction is famous for volume — acres of muscle cars crossing the block over more than a week. But the real draw for serious collectors is the oddball that shouldn’t exist at all, like a factory-built Pontiac Trans Am wagon GM never intended to sell to the public. Here’s the story behind one of the strangest survivors to ever roll across an auction stage.
This LS engine teardown starts with the same uncertainty every rebuild does — you never quite know what years of neglect actually did until the first bolts come loose. Viewers ranging from lifelong diesel technicians to first-time builders have weighed in on the technique, debating everything from head bolt removal order to a cheap salvage-yard 6.0-liter with an oddball factory quirk. Watch to see exactly what comes out of this engine, one bolt at a time.
In Queens, one owner has spent decades keeping his 1972 Oldsmobile Cutlass alive, running, and racing through exactly the kind of environment that kills most classic cars: rock salt, potholes, and a driving culture built on aggression. MotorTrend’s House of Muscle profiles Eddie and the car locals call “AY OOH,” a nickname earned through years of street racing rather than a paint shop decal. Watch to see how a car this old survives New York City.
A 1970 Dodge Coronet with a six-cylinder and a stock rear end really was pretty pedestrian by today’s standards – but that’s not the whole story. Order the same car as a Super Bee with the 426 Hemi and the right gearing, and documented runs put it in the 12-second quarter mile bracket at well over 100 mph. Factory horsepower ratings from that era were also notoriously conservative, hiding just how much these engines actually made. Here’s the case for why “muscle cars were slow” doesn’t hold up once you look past the average car.
A father’s driveway trick turned a loose tooth and a Chevy Camaro into one of the most-replayed home videos on YouTube, racking up nearly 3 million views and a comment section that has been arguing about it for a decade. The method is simple — a length of string, a slow reverse, and a kid who barely has time to react — but the family behind it insists it was never as risky as it looks. Watch to see just how fast it really happens.
This 1970 Buick GSX spent years as a rusted, non-running wreck before a full restoration brought it back to its factory Saturn Yellow finish — one of just 491 built in that color out of 678 GSX cars total. Buick’s overlooked muscle car packed a 455 cubic-inch Stage 1 V8 rated at 360 horsepower, though real output likely ran closer to 376. Read on to find out what it took to bring a rolling wreck back to magazine-cover condition.
In this scene from The Fate of the Furious, Dom Toretto tries to escape with a stolen nuclear football while an enemy truck launches actual harpoons into his GTX-style muscle car and drags it down the street. It’s one of the most-watched clips Movieclips has ever posted, and the internet has spent years mining it for jokes about Dom’s mythical Family gear. Ridiculous as the physics are, the scene keeps a Mopar muscle car in front of tens of millions of viewers. Watch the clip that launched a thousand memes.
Behind the muscle cars rolling through the South East Moparty Picnic is a Hollywood footnote almost nobody knows — the 1971 Hemi ‘Cuda convertible Don Johnson drove in Nash Bridges wasn’t really a ’71 at all, because Plymouth only ever built eleven or twelve of the real thing. Here’s how three modified 1970 convertibles became one of TV’s most famous muscle cars, and why Mopar loyalists still argue about it today.
The 1973 Pontiac Trans Am Super Duty 455 arrived at the worst possible moment for a big-block muscle car — insurance rates were climbing, emissions rules were tightening, and most of Detroit had already walked away. V8TV’s look at this SD-455 explains why Pontiac built it anyway, and why Car and Driver once called it one of the last true fast cars of its era. Watch to see what’s hiding under that shaker hood.
The 1969 Firebird Trans Am existed for exactly one model year in this form, wearing a color combination buyers couldn’t change and stripes that ran straight over the roof, a look Pontiac never repeated. This Ram Air III 4-speed example from The Brothers Collection pairs that one-year-only styling with a functional hood feeding a 400 cubic inch V8. See what made the very first Trans Am look and drive like nothing else on the lot.
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.
There is a very specific sound that still turns heads on quiet streets more than sixty years after Detroit built the cars that made it, and an entire American car culture grew up around chasing that exact reaction. From the quarter-mile drag strip to Woodward Avenue’s nightly cruising ritual, the appeal was never really about spec sheets alone. Read on to find out how insurance surcharges, oil shortages, and shifting regulations nearly ended the era entirely, and why it came roaring back anyway.
A vintage 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T commercial has quietly become a cult favorite for reasons that have little to do with horsepower: a blustering, law-enforcement bit built around a Southern sheriff that viewers now recognize as an eerie preview of Buford T. Justice, seven years before Smokey and the Bandit made the archetype famous. Behind the joke sits a genuinely serious muscle car, available with everything from a 383 Magnum up to the 426 Hemi. Watch the full spot to see where the joke started.
