Posts Tagged: Muscle
The muscle car era produced more than horsepower bragging rights — it produced genuine engineering firsts that quietly became standard equipment decades later, from Ram Air induction to the first mass-produced overhead-cam engine built by a major American automaker. Five specific innovations, built under real deadline pressure by manufacturers racing each other for market share, still shape how performance cars are designed today. Read on to find out which five made the list, and why disc brakes owe more to the Corvette than most drivers realize.
A supercharged Hemi wasn’t the surprising part of the Charger SRT Hellcat – the stopwatch numbers were. This four-door family sedan runs 0-60 in roughly 3.6 seconds and tops out near 204 mph, numbers that would embarrass plenty of dedicated two-door muscle cars. Here’s how Dodge built a genuine supercar into a car meant for car seats.
Long before car memes existed online, muscle car culture was already built on the same kind of good-natured ribbing — chalked onto staging lanes, printed on bumper stickers, or scrawled across club newsletters. The photo above is just the latest version of a tradition that’s been running for as long as these cars have existed.
Pairing a beautiful car with an even more striking model is a marketing trick older than the automobile itself, one that reached full bloom in 1960s muscle car advertising with lines like Pontiac’s famous ‘What’s new pussycats?’ GTO campaign. Read on to find out how a decades-old formula built purely to provoke a reaction still shows up at car shows today, and why the original photographs have become collectible artifacts in their own right.