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Ask ten gearheads to define ‘muscle car’ and you’ll get ten different answers — and at least one argument about whether a Mustang counts. The real definition comes down to a specific formula Detroit stumbled into in the mid-1960s: a mid-size body paired with the biggest engine a manufacturer had to offer. From the Pontiac GTO’s accidental invention of the category to a modern restomod chasing genuine ZL1 power, read on to see what actually separates a muscle car from every other fast classic.
A nineteenth-century French physicist’s glass jar of lead and acid still powers every muscle car on the road today. Gaston Plante’s 1859 lead-acid battery set the template that Delco and Detroit’s big-block engines would come to depend on for reliable starts. Here is how a decades-old invention quietly shaped the cars in this trivia list.
Filmed at Raceway Park’s Street Wars event in Englishtown, New Jersey on November 2, 2014, this compilation lines up American muscle against import tuner cars run after run down the quarter mile. One entrant, a compact SUV nobody expected to take seriously, turned in a number that still has commenters arguing years later. Watch to see which side actually earned bragging rights that day.
Ron Reolfi’s 1968 Chevrolet Camaro disappeared from outside his North Canton, Ohio workplace in twenty minutes back in 1981 — and stayed gone for 33 years. The reason it eventually came back has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with a title that never legally changed hands. Watch the full story of how a decades-old paperwork trail reunited a man with the car he never stopped losing.
Every October, a stretch of Wildwood beach turns into a time machine as pre-1934 hot rods and pre-1957 motorcycles line up to race the way drivers did generations ago. The event traces back to a club of World War II veterans chasing speed after coming home, and its no-modern-parts rules mean every slide through the sand is as unpredictable as it was decades ago. Here’s what makes this beach race one of the most photographed weekends on the hot rod calendar.