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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.
This 2003 Ford Mustang SVT Cobra convertible has covered under 4,400 miles since new, spending most of its life with a single Ford collector before landing at Vanguard Motor Sales. Under the hood is the supercharged 4.6-liter Terminator V8 that made this generation of Cobra famous, paired with a six-speed manual and a limited-slip rear end. The paint, top, and interior all read like a car barely broken in. Cars this clean rarely stay on a lot for long.
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.