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A small group of muscle car enthusiasts built Equus Automotive around a simple bet: that a hand-built coupe with a Corvette ZR1 drivetrain and a retro-inspired body could compete with far more established manufacturers. The Bass770 backs that bet with 640 horsepower, carbon-ceramic Brembo brakes, and a six-figure price tag to match. Read on to see what a four-month custom build actually gets you.
Ford built 7,014 Boss 302 Mustangs in 1970, more than four times the previous year’s run, and yet a genuinely numbers-matching example still stops people in their tracks. The car exists because of a rulebook rather than a showroom wish list: Ford needed a homologated 302 to chase the Camaro Z/28 around Trans-Am road courses. Then it handed the styling to a designer who had never done a full production car. Read on for what he came up with.
Most concept cars end up crushed or crated. The first 2007 Shelby GT ever built spent years as a working development mule instead, wearing a Whipple supercharger, Baer brakes, and 20-inch wheels while Shelby figured out what customers would eventually be able to order. It showed up at Barrett-Jackson Las Vegas as Lot 737 with 9,360 miles on it. Here is why that particular Mustang mattered more than its horsepower number suggests.
Ford rushed the original Thunderbird into existence as a direct response to the Chevrolet Corvette, seriously considering names like Apache and P-51 Mustang before settling on a mythical bird at the last minute. The two-seat 1955-56 car outsold the Corvette 23 to 1 and introduced a genuinely inventive hydraulic top-and-trunk system with a few real quirks. Read on to find out what Ford got right, and what still leaked.
Under the hood of this fastback sits an all-aluminum, four-cam V8 that was built to win at Indianapolis, not to sit at a stoplight. It belongs to a family of engines that took three consecutive Indy 500 victories and ended the Offenhauser era before turbocharging brought it back. Getting one to idle in traffic required rethinking almost everything about how it breathes. Read on for what that actually took.
Ford’s FE V8 powered nearly every brand in the lineup for eighteen years, from Fairlanes and Mustangs to the AC Cobra and the purpose-built Thunderbolt drag car, while NASCAR homologation rules forced Ford to keep pace on the street. A side-oiler fix born on the race track, industrial and marine applications, and a still-thriving aftermarket kept the engine relevant decades after Ford stopped building it. Read on to find out what actually separates an FE from its heavy-duty FT cousin.
Ford moved 105,932 Mustangs in the United States during 2016, finishing well clear of both the Chevrolet Camaro and the Dodge Challenger and extending a winning streak that had already run several years. The interesting part is not the margin but what was happening underneath it, because Chevrolet had just launched an all-new Camaro and Dodge was selling a car whose basic architecture dated to 2008. Here is what actually drove those numbers.
Forty-two years after the original Boss 302 was built to win a Trans-Am race, Ford brought the name back with one very specific goal: beat a BMW M3 around Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. Around the same time, Chevrolet revived the ZL1 badge — a name that started with one Illinois dealer’s odd request for fifty aluminum-block Camaros — on a supercharged, 550-plus horsepower Camaro built using suspension technology borrowed from the Corvette ZR1. Read on to find out how two of Detroit’s oldest names ended up chasing the same import.
Keeping a decades-old muscle car or hot rod on the road depends on a fragile supply chain of reproduction parts, machine shops, and specialty suppliers that has swung wildly in quality and availability over the decades. When that industry gets it right, restorations get easier and more cars end up back on the road. Read on to find out what’s actually changed, and why enthusiasts are paying attention.
Walter Banks parked his 2016 Shelby GT350 Mustang in the shade at a small-town cruise-in, right alongside rat rods held together by rust and freshly restored muscle cars that still smell like new paint. That mix of eras and budgets is exactly what keeps local cruise-ins packed year after year. Read on to find out why events like this one keep drawing bigger crowds than formal concours shows.
For the Mustang’s fiftieth anniversary, Ford threw out the playbook: the 2015 car shared no carryover parts with any Mustang before it, introduced an independent rear suspension the nameplate had only used once in its history, and brought back a four-cylinder option for the first time since 1993. It was the moment the pony car stopped being a straight-line specialist and started chasing sports cars. Read on for what changed underneath, and what the solid-axle crowd lost in the process.
Ford took a gamble in the spring of 1964 that most of Detroit thought was reckless, and by 1965 it had sold 559,451 Mustangs and invented an entire class of American car. Buyers could order the same 289 V8 in three distinct states of tune, from a 200-horsepower two-barrel to the 271-horsepower HiPo K-code. The car pictured here runs the milder end of that lineup through a Cruise-O-Matic automatic. Read on for what separated the C-code, A-code and K-code cars, and why originality now matters more than restoration.
The Chrysler 300L closed out one of Detroit’s most overlooked performance lineages in 1965, a 413 cubic inch V8 rated at 360 horsepower, wrapped in a plush, comfort-focused body that arguably invented the muscle car formula before the term existed. With only 2,845 built, including 440 convertibles, this entry breaks down what made the letter series’ final chapter both rare and surprisingly affordable. Read on to find out why it might be the segment’s best value.
A crowded parking lot, a driver trying to show off with donuts, and a split-second mistake that turned a car meet into chaos. Two two steele’s footage of a Mustang plowing into spectators captures the exact moment car meet culture’s biggest ongoing safety problem stops being a hypothetical and starts being a Mustang headed straight for a group of people who came to watch, not to run.