Muscle Car Fan

Posts Tagged: Mustang

Michelle Bongiovanni’s classmates at Penn State did not believe her, and it is hard to blame them. She spends weekends running eight-second quarter miles in a Mustang that Ford builds specifically so it cannot be registered for the road. The Cobra Jet is one of the strangest things a manufacturer sells: a factory-built drag car with no VIN for street use and no pretense of being anything else. Read on to find out how a Mustang ends up like this.

A stock street Mustang meets its match against a 1973 Plymouth Roadrunner GTX built and sponsored by Intellitec College, packing a methanol-burning, supercharged 440 good for 1,100 horsepower and a 9.20-second quarter mile at 150 mph. Viewers have spent over a decade arguing in the comments about whether it even counts as a fair race. It does not, and that is exactly the point. Watch the numbers do the talking once the tree drops.

When Ford pulled the covers off the 2018 Mustang convertible, the biggest news was not what got added. It was what quietly disappeared from the order sheet after decades of being the default choice for droptop buyers. What replaced it split the lineup into two extremes with nothing in the middle, and gave the convertible a dashboard that had no business being in a pony car. Read on for what changed.

The 1969 Camaro SS’s official order sheet topped out at a 375-horsepower 396, but a separate, little-known path let buyers get a factory 427 anyway — through Chevrolet’s COPO ordering system or through tuner dealers like Yenko and Baldwin-Motion. The rarest of those, the aluminum-block COPO ZL1, was built in tiny numbers and now ranks among the most valuable Camaros in existence. It’s proof the fastest ’69 SS wasn’t always the one on the brochure.

Chevrolet spent years developing the Camaro under a code name that had nothing to do with cats and everything to do with secrecy, then refused to explain what the production name actually meant. The answer a company spokesman finally gave the press has been quoted ever since. Across thirty-five years and four generations the car went from a 427 big block to a four-cylinder to an all-aluminum 305-horsepower LS1. Read on for how it got there.

When Muscle Car Fan’s following crossed half a million, the site marked it with a short trailer instead of a victory lap, a quiet nod to years of owner interviews and feature stories rather than one viral moment. Reaching that scale in a niche this specific says something about how far muscle car nostalgia actually reaches beyond the collector crowd. The bigger story is not the number itself, it is what kept that many people showing up. Watch the trailer and see how it is framed.

A 1967 Shelby GT350 sat still for three decades before somebody finally turned the key and let it idle back to life. The ’67 was the year Shelby’s Mustang grew up, gained weight, and split its own fan base right down the middle. Between a factory Paxton option, a fiberglass nose nobody expected, and a production run small enough to matter today, there is more to this car than the dust on it suggests. Read on to find out why the ’67 still divides people.

Ford built the Boss 302 engine to satisfy a rulebook, not a showroom, and almost everyone remembers the Mustang that carried it. Far fewer remember that Mercury put the same engine in a Cougar, wearing an Eliminator badge and built in numbers small enough that most enthusiasts have never seen one in person. Read on to find out why Mercury’s version stayed in the shadows.

Ford’s official records say the Boss 302 ended after 1970, which makes this surviving 1971 example something that technically shouldn’t exist. Jerry Heasley tracks down the story behind a car discovered through an eBay listing rather than any collector network, likely a factory prototype or pre-production test car. The restoration that followed only adds to its rarity. Watch to see how a car outside Ford’s own history books turned up for sale online.

Two hundred miles an hour used to be a number reserved for exotics, not something you ordered at a Ford dealership. Then SVT dropped a 5.8-liter supercharged V8 into the 2013 Mustang and produced 662 horsepower — the most powerful production V8 in the world at the time. It came with one transmission choice and a solid rear axle. Read on for how Ford made all of that work.

The 1964 Ford Falcon debuted a squarer, more mature restyle and a genuine performance option in the Sprint package, built around the Fairlane’s 260 V8. Few buyers realized this unassuming compact supplied the unitized chassis, suspension, and drivetrain components that became the foundation of the Mustang. Interchangeable parts made the Falcon easy to keep on the road, but harder to keep in Ford’s spotlight.

Gas Ronda’s bright orange 1965 Mustang is one of a handful of A/FX factory drag cars built with Ford’s 427 SOHC Cammer engine, an all-out answer to Chrysler’s Hemi that Ford engineers designed in roughly 90 days. Holman-Moody stripped these cars down to almost nothing before the season started. Restored to as-raced condition, it shows exactly how far a factory would go to win a class in 1965.

Beyond the Cyclone, GTO, and Cougar, a handful of other muscle cars from the same era are still trading for surprisingly little, some for less than a new economy car. Find out which overlooked models are worth chasing, and what actually separates a genuine bargain from an expensive mistake.

Edmunds editors James Riswick and Mike Monticello go head-to-head over the 2015 Ford Mustang GT and Dodge Challenger R/T, debating performance, comfort, and interior quality without ever fully agreeing on a winner. Nearly a decade later, the comments are still split down the middle between Mustang’s sharper handling and Challenger’s back-seat practicality. It’s a rivalry that’s only grown more entrenched with time. Watch to see which side of the debate you land on.

Carroll Shelby built only 562 examples of the original 1965 GT350, a Mustang so stripped-down and race-focused it barely resembled the more comfortable 1966 version that followed it. Hertz alone would go on to order more GT350s for its rental fleet than Shelby sold at retail. Read on to find out how one VIN code stamped with the letter ‘R’ can separate a genuine early Shelby from a look-alike.

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