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Helsinki’s car cruising tradition dates back to 1983, but the newer Malmi Airport pre-party — first held in 2014 — has become an event in its own right, drawing muscle cars, hot rods, and classics hours before the main cruise into the city. The May 2016 gathering was reportedly the biggest pre-party yet. See what packed the runway that night.
Pontiac rated the 1973 Super Duty 455 at 290 net horsepower, a figure most experts believe was deliberately conservative by around 85 horsepower. The engine used a reinforced block, four-bolt mains, forged rods and pistons, and a nitrided crankshaft. Only 252 SD-455 Trans Ams were built that year out of 4,802 total, split 72 manual and 180 automatic. Read on to find out how one engineering team built a genuine muscle car in the year everyone else quit.
Every car on this list has one thing in common: buyers keep paying a premium regardless of what else is happening in the market. Rarity, documented history, and a wave of nostalgia driven demand, especially from younger collectors introduced to these cars through film and pop culture, keep pushing prices for even once affordable muscle cars steadily upward. It is a reminder that horsepower alone was never the whole story.
Buying a muscle car is rarely as simple as signing the paperwork — insurance, storage, resale value, and repair costs all factor into whether the purchase makes sense long-term. Some models appreciate with proper care; others lose value the moment you drive them home. Read on for the questions worth answering before you commit to a purchase you can’t easily walk back.
The idea that any muscle car is a guaranteed investment has been repeated for two decades, and it is not so much wrong as badly out of date. Median auction prices have slipped to their lowest point since 2020 even while specific models keep climbing hard. The gap between those two facts is where buyers get hurt. Read on for what the numbers actually show and which attributes still hold value.
V8TV dug through 1970’s own magazine road tests to rank the ten quickest muscle cars of the year, using the era’s published numbers rather than modern dyno figures. The order does not always favor the biggest engine, and gearing plays a bigger role than most viewers expect. One commenter’s memory of his father’s 1970 Chevelle SS 396 shows just how personal these numbers still are. Watch to see which cars made the cut.
Dodge ran a teaser campaign for the 2018 Challenger SRT Demon that released one detail at a time for months, and the finished car turned out to be stranger than the speculation. The interesting engineering is not the horsepower figure but the systems built around it, from an air conditioner repurposed as an intercooler chiller to a TransBrake borrowed from bracket racing. Read on for what was really under that hood scoop.
Jay Leno’s roughly 180-car collection includes American muscle he actually drives and maintains himself, while Ralph Lauren takes the opposite approach with a smaller collection reportedly worth hundreds of millions. Paul Walker owned more than 30 cars before his death, and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons turned his obsession into a published book. Read on for why collectors who could own literally anything else keep coming back to American muscle.
Muscle cars don’t fail the way modern daily drivers do — they fail from sitting still, wrong parts, and skipped basics like waxing and monthly drives. A little consistent care, from garage storage to a 30-minute drive once a month, is the difference between a car that holds its value and one that quietly turns into an expensive project. Read on for the maintenance habits that actually matter.
There’s a decades-old argument about which brand of American muscle actually deserves bragging rights, and at a test track outside Las Vegas, you can settle it with a stopwatch instead of an opinion. This roundup covers the Richard Petty Driving Experience’s American Muscle Car Challenge alongside a 145-car Barrett-Jackson consignment, a packed holiday cruise-in, and a widow’s tribute to her car-loving husband.
Muscle cars run on a simple formula: big power, small price. Japan never quite matched that formula until Infiniti’s 2018 Q50 Red Sport 400 showed up with 400 horsepower, four doors, and a price tag tens of thousands below what a GT-R or RC F demands. First-drive reviewers loved the power but split hard on one specific detail. Here’s what stood out.
These three overlooked muscle cars all earned obscurity in different ways, from a Hemi Dart built purely for the drag strip to a Rebel Machine unveiled at NHRA’s biggest stage. The Hemi Dart’s 426 engine ran quarter-mile times in the nine-second range not long after leaving the factory, numbers that still hold up decades later. AMC’s Machine countered with a standard 340-horsepower V8 built for straight-line bragging rights of its own. Here’s what made each of these forgotten muscle cars worth a second look.
A pole barn near Pennfield holding seven or eight muscle cars caught fire, and the fuel stored alongside the cars kept the flames going for hours after crews arrived. Pole barns are the default storage for collector cars across rural America, but they offer almost none of the fire protection of a dedicated garage. Here is what happened, why these fires are so hard to contain, and what every owner storing a collection under one roof should change.
American muscle cars have found an unlikely second home in Japan, thanks largely to one hot rodder’s decades-long effort to bring the culture overseas. The Mooneyes shows in Tokyo and Yokohama now draw tens of thousands of fans to see hundreds of vehicles and motorcycles each year. Wandering through the crowd, though, this video finds something that has nothing to do with Detroit at all. Here’s the story behind the show, and the oddity that stole the spotlight.
Two red muscle cars, one racetrack, and zero information to go on, just the shapes to judge them by. This kind of side-by-side forces you to rely on stance, proportions, and gut instinct instead of spec sheets. It’s the purest version of the ‘which one would you drive’ debate that muscle car fans have been having for decades. Pick a side and see if you can defend it.