Posts Tagged: muscle cars
Plymouth once paid Warner Bros. $50,000 just so the Road Runner could borrow a cartoon bird’s name and its ‘beep-beep’ horn — and it turned into one of Detroit’s best-ever marketing bets. By 1970, the car had a redesigned Air Grabber hood and a genuine 425-horsepower Hemi option, but only 152 buyers ever ordered one. This numbers-style 440 Six Barrel hardtop shows what nearly everyone else actually drove home instead.
Dodge’s new 550-horsepower Charger Scat Pack borrows a nameplate that goes back to 1969 — but the original “Six Pack” didn’t have six cylinders at all, it had six carburetor barrels bolted to a 440 V8. A week of real-world commuting captured with binaural microphones shows what the twin-turbo namesake actually delivers: a 3.7-second 0-60 time and a driving experience nobody expects from a car named after a decades-old carburetor joke.
The 1969 Pontiac GTO Judge got its name from a TV catchphrase everyone was repeating in 1968, and Pontiac somehow turned the bit into one of Detroit’s most collectible muscle cars. Only 6,833 were built, most of them hardtops, all riding on a 400-cubic-inch Ram Air V8. Here’s the story behind the name, the numbers, and the paint color that made it unmistakable.
A naturally aspirated Corvette Z06 was never supposed to beat a 707-horsepower supercharged Hellcat — especially not after giving it a head start. This drag racing compilation from Wheels pits the Z06 against a Hellcat, an Audi RS6, and one very confused Honda that ended up on the track by accident. The result surprised even the Corvette’s own fans watching along. Watch to see exactly how lopsided the numbers turned out to be.
Chevrolet’s El Camino spent most of its life looking like a work truck wearing a Chevy badge — until 1970, when a one-year corporate rule change let Chevy drop its 450-horsepower LS6 big-block under the hood. Only a few hundred buyers ever ordered that combination. Here’s why the rarest El Camino Chevrolet ever built deserves a second look.
John had never done a burnout in his nephew’s uncle’s 1967 Pontiac GTO — until a little on-camera peer pressure changed his mind. The channel’s host calls the car a flat 10 out of 10, and this ride-along captures both the hesitation and the payoff of finally letting a half-century-old muscle car do what it was built to do. Watch to see what talked him into it.
For $2,547, Plymouth handed buyers a compact built to look forgettable, with a genuine 340 cubic-inch V8 hiding under that plain sheet metal. Here’s how the Duster 340 quietly became one of Detroit’s smartest muscle car buys, and why numbers-matching survivors are only now getting the collector attention they’ve earned.
Chevrolet’s Camaro beat the Ford Mustang for America’s top-selling muscle car crown in September and October — then lost it right back in November, proof that this decades-old sales rivalry can flip in a single month. The same stretch also saw a lifelong Chevelle SS hunt finally pay off, a new Motor Trend show built entirely around muscle car culture, and a 560-horsepower pro-touring Camaro built by Detroit Speed. Read on for what the whole picture says about the state of muscle cars in the mid-2010s.
Creator Sick McVick films an entire burnout tutorial from the passenger seat, breaking down exactly how to smoke the tires in a 1970s automatic muscle car — a technique manual-only guides never cover. The car itself has drawn comparisons to the black Nova from Tarantino’s Death Proof, with multiple commenters independently spotting the resemblance. Beyond the driving lesson, the video’s loose, high-energy style has viewers comparing the host to a mashup of two well-known comedic actors. The result is equal parts instructional content and pure car-culture entertainment.
More than 200 classic, sport, and muscle cars filled Saratoga Spa State Park for the Saratoga Automobile Museum’s 15th annual spring show. The museum itself has an unusual backstory, housed in a repurposed Georgian Revival building that once served as a New York State bottling plant. The turnout capped off a season-opening event with an audience built from the region’s century-old resort-town appeal. Read on to find out what made this year’s show stand out.
Comedian Gabriel Iglesias just showed off two 1988 Monte Carlo SS coupes on Jay Leno’s Garage, and one of them still has the factory plastic on its seats. Chevrolet built just 16,204 before retiring the G-body platform for good. Here’s why a 180-horsepower cruiser from 1988 still makes grown men weak in the knees.
Buick spent two decades disguising some of the fastest cars General Motors ever built as luxury sedans. The 1970 GSX Stage 1 hid a 510 lb-ft big block under a car built for church parking lots, and the 1987 turbocharged GNX blew past that year’s Corvette in the quarter-mile. Here’s how a brand nobody feared became one of muscle car history’s biggest sleepers.