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Former GM vice chairman Bob Lutz publicly said the Ford Mustang beats the Chevrolet Camaro on packaging and visibility, an unusually blunt admission from someone who once helped run Camaro’s own manufacturer. His criticism centered on the Camaro’s narrow greenhouse and awkward driving position rather than its performance credentials. Read on for why an industry veteran’s unfiltered opinion still carries weight in the pony car debate.
The Camaro was born as Chevy’s rushed answer to the Ford Mustang, rolling off the line months ahead of schedule just to compete. Fifty years, six generations, and more than five million cars later, it has become an American institution in its own right. Here’s how Chevrolet marked the milestone, and how a car built to catch up ended up setting the pace.
This compilation skips the usual Camaro-and-Mustang highlight reel to spotlight muscle cars that never got their due — built entirely around engine sound and on-screen text rather than narration. Cars like the AMC Rebel Machine and Mercury Cyclone Spoiler packed genuinely competitive specs but never had the marketing muscle of their more famous rivals. Decades later, they’re still waiting for recognition.
A stray comment in retired fireman Garrett Moore’s man cave sent Pete Rudometkin slogging through the worst rains Northern California had seen in thirty years, chasing a 1970 Mustang fastback abandoned on a ranch between Petaluma and Rohnert Park. What he found was an R-code 428 Ram Air Cobra Jet Mach 1 — and buried in its build sheet, the W-code that made it genuinely rare. Read on for what that code means and why it changes everything.
An ’08 Smart Car running a boosted Toyota Paseo engine lined up against a Shelby Mustang on a Colorado test-and-tune night, and the first run nearly ended in a wheelstand before the car even left the line. By the second pass, the tiny hatchback had cut its time to 12.53 at 107 mph and put the Mustang on the trailer. Drag racing regulars in the comments call it one of the purest sleeper builds they have seen. Watch to see exactly how a car this small pulls it off.
Mark Wickens went looking for a Mini or a Mitsubishi Lancer in 2015 and drove home with production number 1638 of Ford’s Shelby GT run instead. Finished in black with a silver stripe, this numbered Mustang carries a genuine ‘Powered by Ford’ badge that separates it from tuner-built imitators, a detail collectors increasingly treat as a mark of long-term value. Nearly two decades later, this accidental find is still turning heads outside a Scottsdale burger joint. See why an economy-car search ended somewhere else entirely.
A modestly modified 2003 SVT Cobra lines up against a brand-new, completely stock 2016 Corvette Z06 in this DirtySS street pull, and the result has split comment sections for years. Longtime Mustang owners argue the horsepower math doesn’t add up for a bolt-on Terminator to hang with a factory-supercharged Z06, which only fuels the debate over what’s really under that hood. The footage keeps circulating precisely because nobody can fully agree on the answer.
The Mustang RTR is Vaughn Gittin Jr.’s production interpretation of the car he drifts for a living, and its tiers differ by considerably more than badges. The 472-horsepower figure attached to the GT comes from Ford Performance hardware rather than a third-party tuner, which is precisely why the factory warranty survives the upgrade intact. Read on for what separates Spec 1 from Spec 2, and why the suspension work may matter more than the power does.
A 1970 Chevelle running a 383-cubic-inch small block crate engine lined up against a 2009 Mustang GT running little more than a cold air intake and a tune — and the Chevelle’s front end came off the ground before either car had gone ten feet. The comments turned into a full small-block-vs-big-block debate. Watch to see how the race actually finished.
A wet road in Grand Prairie, Texas turned into a cautionary tale when a Mustang driver challenged a GTO to an impromptu race – and the GTO driver said no. What happened next, caught entirely on dashcam, has racked up nearly 600,000 views and sparked a running debate over what the Mustang driver should have done differently. The GTO driver, meanwhile, earned respect for staying out of it and stepping in afterward. See how quickly a bad decision on slick pavement can unravel.
Ford reshaped its mid-size muscle car for 1973 to meet new federal bumper rules, and the redesign paid off with a 52 percent jump in production over 1971. Buyers could choose between a humble inline-six and a deeper bench of V8 options than you’d guess, with the sportiest Gran Torino Sport reserved for V8 power only. The changes pushed the Torino ahead of its longtime rival, the Chevrolet Chevelle, in Fords ongoing battle for intermediate muscle car sales.
Ford built the Boss 351 for a single model year in 1971, and Hot Rod Magazine later dyno-tested it at 383 horsepower, enough to outmuscle plenty of genuine big-blocks from the era. At the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals in Chicago, V8TV’s cameras caught up with one of these overlooked one-year wonders on display among the country’s rarest Mustangs and Corvettes. One commenter once found a genuine example rotting in a salvage yard for $2,650. See why this small-block still divides opinion.
In late 1966, three brand-new Mustangs sat finished in Shelby American’s Los Angeles shop, all painted Candyapple Red: a coupe, a fastback, and a convertible. Two became the template for a production run. The third never did, because Ford shelved the convertible GT500 for a year, leaving exactly one 1967 example in existence — and Carroll Shelby kept it for himself. Read on to find out what happened to serial number 0139.
Hollywood built eleven Mustangs to play Eleanor in the 2000 remake of Gone in 60 Seconds, and only three of them could actually be driven. None was a real Shelby GT500. A quarter century later the replica business built around that car is still going, now offering twin-turbocharged and Coyote-powered versions the film cars never had, and a federal appeals court has finally settled the long-running fight over who is allowed to build them. Read on to find out how a movie prop became one of the most copied Mustangs ever made.
A Cummins-powered diesel truck runs a legitimate 9.18 seconds at 147.46 mph at a Pinks All Out event at Summit Motorsports Park in Norwalk, Ohio, numbers that would embarrass plenty of sports cars. The uploader even had to clarify it was a full quarter-mile pass after skeptical commenters assumed it was the shorter eighth-mile. Viewers in the comments cannot decide whether to be impressed or defensive about a truck running these numbers. Watch the launch and see why fifteen to twenty psi of boost changes everything.