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This 1970 Mercury Cyclone Spoiler II was built to race the Dodge Daytona and Plymouth Superbird on NASCAR’s fastest tracks, using the same aerodynamic-war engineering, before a rule change ended the entire aero era before it ever competed. Owner Steve Honnell preserves the genuine 1-of-1 car alongside its period jacket and factory stereo, complete with the 429’s unmistakable 12.5:1-compression growl. Watch to hear a NASCAR weapon that never got to fight.
Ford needed to sell 500 street versions of this car just to legally race it in NASCAR, and the result was a low-key muscle car with a nose job so subtle most buyers probably never realized they were driving a rolling aero experiment. Underneath a bench seat and column shifter sits the story of how badly Ford wanted to beat Chrysler at Talladega Superspeedway. Read on to find out just how far the aero wars actually went.
Roland Cassidy assumed the pitch was too good to be true: a numbers-matching 426 Hemi Superbird with 10,000 original miles, one owner, and a complete paper trail back to a Maine dealership in 1971. It had been sitting untouched in a Massachusetts barn since 1990. Read on to find out what he had to throw in to close the deal.
Chevrolet’s 2018 NASCAR Cup Series entry borrowed its ZL1-inspired styling from the street car but almost nothing else, running a purpose-built racing V8 instead of the supercharged engine buyers could actually order. The switch came after the Chevrolet SS, its predecessor, was discontinued with little warning. Read on to find out what makes the Cup car’s engine so different from anything on a showroom floor.
Chevrolet built the 1987 Monte Carlo SS Aerocoupe strictly to satisfy NASCAR’s homologation rules — but production exploded from 200 cars in 1986 to over 6,000 the following year once buyers caught on. That steeply raked backlight wasn’t just a superspeedway trick; it turned into one of the most collectible G-bodies Chevrolet ever built.
Plymouth built the 1970 Superbird for exactly one model year, in exactly one body style, to accomplish exactly one thing: win at NASCAR and bring Richard Petty back from Ford. It did both. Then dealers could not give the leftovers away, and buyers had the wings removed to make them sellable. Today those same cars are six-figure collector pieces. Read on for how that reversal happened.
In 1964, Ford squeezed a race-bred 427 V8 into the Galaxie 500, and NASCAR promptly banned the racing version as “too exotic” before it could dominate a single superspeedway. Only 3,140 R-code Galaxies were built that year, and just 76 are known to survive today. Here’s the story behind Ford’s short-lived big-block gamble and the handful of survivors still turning heads.
The 1963 Ford Galaxie 500XL offered buyers a spread of engines topped by an all-new 427-cubic-inch V8, built specifically to exploit NASCAR’s newly raised displacement limit. The rarest version, a dual-carburetor 425-horsepower R-code, saw fewer than 3,900 examples built for the entire model year. That combination of race-bred engineering and genuine scarcity makes surviving R-code Galaxies among the most valuable full-size Fords ever built.
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.
Justin Bieber’s Ferrari was just one of many high-profile cars at this Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale sale, alongside NASCAR and Hollywood names on hand for the show. The event traces back to a 1967 local car show turned annual auction empire. Here is how it grew, and why some of the cars on the block that day were not for profit at all.
Chrysler’s second generation Hemi arrived in 1964 as a race engine barely disguised as a production part, and its nickname came honestly. The 426 stood 10.72 inches at the deck, spread its bores 4.80 inches apart, and needed an engine bay most cars did not have. Roughly 11,000 street versions were ever built. Read on for how NASCAR banned it, why the valvetrain made it so expensive, and what made it the default choice for nitro racing.
This TorRed 1970 Plymouth Superbird carries one of muscle car history’s stranger stories: a NASCAR-bred aero warrior with a 426 Hemi under the hood that once served as a getaway car in a Reno casino heist. V8TV’s Brothers Collection walkaround traces both its racing pedigree and its brush with crime before its restoration. The wing and nose cone alone make it unmistakable. Watch to see how a car built to be seen ended up in a story about trying not to be.
Ramo Stott’s #7 Superbird won four races across ARCA, USAC, and NASCAR-adjacent competition in the early 1970s, and current owner Doug Schellinger has spent years turning its scars into documented history, down to a rear window that Stott himself deformed with a blowtorch to pass tech inspection. Every ding, weld, and mismatched panel on this car has a story and, often, a photograph to back it up. Read on to find out how a blown engine and a stubborn NASCAR inspector shaped one of the most authenticated winged cars left on the road.
Deep inside a Wisconsin barn, under a stripe of bird droppings and a small mountain of collapsed hay, sat two of Mopar’s rarest aero warriors: a 1969 Dodge Charger 500 and a 1970 Plymouth Superbird, untouched for the better part of thirty years. Their owner found each one through a different stroke of luck, a vague classified ad and a tip from a wing car club, decades before either car ever left the barn. Read on to find out how both cars ended up parked together, and why one of them still wears its original barn hay to car shows.
Fifteen years before Pontiac supposedly invented the muscle car with the GTO, Oldsmobile had already done it by accident. The Rocket 88 paired a brand-new V8 with a body never designed to carry one, then backed it up with NASCAR wins, a hit song, and a waiting list that lasted years. Read on to find out how a full-size Oldsmobile became the actual first muscle car in America.