 |
In 1969, Plymouth paid Warner Bros. for the rights to a cartoon bird, its signature meep-meep horn, and an entire ad campaign built around outrunning a coyote. This commercial captures that gamble at its peak, arriving the same year the Road Runner won Motor Trend Car of the Year over cars that cost far more. It is proof that a genuinely fast car could still afford to be a little ridiculous. Watch the pitch that convinced a generation of buyers.
Only about 19,000 were ever built, it was the only American two-seater besides the Corvette for three straight years, and it once beat a GTO off the line badly enough that the loser still remembers it fifty years later. The Drive’s /DRIVE+ team goes looking for why AMC’s smallest, lightest muscle car never got its due — and finds a fiercely loyal handful of owners who never stopped arguing it deserved better. What made this car so easy to overlook and so hard to forget?
1970 marked the final year of high-compression muscle before emissions regulations and an unleaded fuel mandate changed everything — and this breakdown argues the real winner of that last great year came from an unexpected place. The Buick GS 455 Stage 1 quietly out-torqued nearly every rival on the market, backed up by a factory performance package most people never associated with Buick. One recent owner’s comment about a first ride with his daughter says it all.
No car show in the country claims a longer unbroken run than the one that kicks off the West Coast’s season every January — and its nine-foot America’s Most Beautiful Roadster trophy has been chased by legendary builders for generations. What started as a tightly focused 1950 roadster show in Oakland has grown into an everything-under-one-roof event covering tri-fives, muscle cars, customs, and rat rods.
Dodge handed over the keys to a 707-horsepower Challenger SRT Hellcat and it delivered exactly the kind of experience the numbers promise, which is to say a slightly alarming one. But the Hellcat’s real significance was not the power figure. It was what that figure forced every other manufacturer in Detroit to do next, and how quickly Dodge itself made the car obsolete. Here is what actually made it work.
Manual transmission drivers have argued for decades about whether engine braking secretly wears out a clutch, and Jason Fenske of Engineering Explained finally settles it with real mechanical reasoning instead of garage folklore. The answer involves rev matching, brake pad life, and fuel cutoff systems most drivers never think about. Nearly three million views later, the comment section is still arguing anyway.
Two headline Challengers arrived in the same 2017 news cycle, and enthusiasts have been mixing them up ever since. The all-wheel-drive one was the Challenger GT, a Pentastar V6 coupe aimed at snow-belt buyers. The 840-horsepower one was the rear-drive SRT Demon that lifted its front wheels off the pavement and ran 9.65 at 140 mph. Here is what each car actually was, and why Dodge needed both at once.
The Dodge Challenger name has worn a lot of different cars over the decades — a 426 Hemi-powered muscle icon in 1970, a rebadged Mitsubishi import by 1978, and an 840-horsepower factory drag weapon by 2018. This video runs through all of it back to back, and the comment section reacts to every twist. Watch to see just how far one nameplate traveled.
A manual Shelby GT500 built to roughly 650 horsepower squares off against a factory-rated 707-horsepower Hellcat Charger in this drag strip grudge match, and the comments section is split on who actually deserved the win. Between a missed second-gear shift and near-universal praise for the Hellcat’s supercharger whine, this race turned into a real debate about whether raw power or clean execution matters more at the line. Watch the full race and judge each launch for yourself.
Dodge spent months teasing the 2018 Challenger SRT Demon without showing a single performance number, leaning instead on the idea that cold, dense air is what really makes a muscle car. When the specs finally landed, they made the teasing look modest: 840 horsepower, a 9.65-second quarter mile, a factory transbrake, an air conditioner repurposed to chill the intake, and a Guinness record for lifting the front wheels off the ground.
Street Wars at Raceway Park in Englishtown mixed muscle, import, and tuner cars into the same lineup on March 13, 2016 — and the pass everyone still talks about wasn’t a muscle car win. A car nobody expected to touch a Nissan GT-R ran a clean 10-second pass and caught the whole crowd off guard, while a Hemi-powered entry went home with a loss one fan still can’t forgive. Watch to see exactly how the lineup shook out.
Ford built fewer than 20 examples of this exact combination: a 429 Super Cobra Jet, the factory drag pack, a four-speed manual, bench seating, and a convertible body, all wrapped in black paint with a red laser stripe. This 1970 Torino GT is exactly the kind of low-production oddity that Muscle Car of the Week was built to spotlight. Longtime Ford enthusiasts rarely get to see a build sheet this unusual restored and running. Watch to see why this convertible stands apart from every other Torino GT.
Curiosity Incorporated filmed this junkyard tour outside Edmonton in the snow, walking rows of rare muscle cars that include a blue Mustang in the opening minutes and a convertible Challenger tucked in right behind another find. No music, no filler — just a host viewers call knowledgeable and passionate, wandering a field of forgotten classics. One commenter said it reminded him of watching American Graffiti with his late father. Watch to see what’s buried under the snow.
Chevrolet already had a Camaro ZL1 that could embarrass six-figure exotics on a road course, so when engineers built a more extreme version they did the unexpected thing and left the 650-horsepower supercharged V8 completely alone. The 2018 ZL1 1LE found roughly three seconds a lap at GM’s Milford Road Course through dampers, tires, downforce, and about sixty pounds of deleted weight instead. From twenty feet away it looks nearly identical to the standard car. It is not.
Lokar’s Muscle Car Shifter Knob is built to replicate the look and feel of a factory GM shifter closely enough to fool most people at a car show, and it won SEMA’s award for Best New Interior Accessory Product. The install is straightforward but order-dependent: the shifter has to be in Park, the set screw inside the knob has to stay untouched, and the adapter housing has to be held steady while tightening. Here’s exactly how to avoid the mistakes first-timers usually make.