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AMC never had the budget of Detroit’s Big Three, and for one model year it stopped pretending that mattered. The Rebel Machine wrapped the most powerful engine the company ever built into a mid-size two-door and sent it to a drag strip for its public debut instead of an auto show. Read on to find out how a car built in such small numbers became the most patriotic-looking muscle car of the era.
A single stretch of muscle car headlines captured just how wide the hobby’s range really is: a collector-car auction billing itself as the world’s largest, a long-overdue disc brake upgrade for classic GM cars, and a 526-horsepower Ford Shelby GT350 built around a flat-plane crank V8. Read on to see how a record auction, a cheap brake fix, and one seriously fast new Mustang all connect.
A Novato homeowner was doing what countless classic car owners do on a weekend — trying to coax a long-dormant engine back to life in his garage. A strange chemical smell on the first attempt should have been a warning sign. Instead, a second try on the ignition ended in an engine bay explosion, a spreading hillside fire, and a two-alarm response from local firefighters. Here’s what actually happened, and why old muscle cars carry this exact risk.
“It’s especially amazing that a muscular muscle car would turn up in a lady’s garage in Bristol,” said a bemused onlooker. The ’68 Firebird, a 5.7-litre V8 with under 84,000 miles, is heading to auction with its one-owner story intact. Meanwhile, muscle car mania is revving up elsewhere: million-dollar beauties strut their stuff at car shows, Kumho V8s roar into the Muscle Car Masters, and a camouflaged 2017 Camaro ZL1 sneaks around in stealth mode. Who knew muscle could be so charmingly mysterious?
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.
Classic Recreations, the only shop officially licensed to build continuation Shelby Mustangs, just did something purists never saw coming: it dropped a turbocharged EcoBoost engine into a car built to honor Carroll Shelby’s big-block legacy. Owner Jason Engel says the move isn’t about abandoning tradition, it’s about keeping a niche, hand-built business alive in markets where displacement taxes make a big V8 impractical. Read on to find out how a turbocharged Shelby continuation stacks up against the original.
Andre Gordon’s blue 1971 Dodge Dart Swinger runs a genuine 340-cubic-inch V8 with a four-speed manual and Hurst pistol-grip shifter — a far cry from the Fiat-based compact Dodge revived decades later, or the Pro Stock Dart five-time champion Jeg Coughlin Jr. campaigns at the NHRA’s top level. Read on to see how one nameplate ended up telling three completely different stories.
A muscle car site covering Tesla news in early 2016 might seem like an odd fit, but the numbers behind that quarter’s delivery report explain why it mattered. Between a battery fire fix, a width comparison that embarrassed full-size trucks, and delivery figures that finally quieted Tesla’s skeptics, the fourth quarter of 2015 turned into a genuine inflection point. Read on to see how an electric startup’s numbers stacked up against Detroit’s own performance obsession.
Muscle car fans have been arguing about what counts as ‘the future’ of the genre for over a decade, and the answer just got a lot more complicated. Back when the supercharged Hellcat represented peak muscle, collectors were paying top dollar for 1967-71 originals like they might vanish overnight. Now Dodge’s answer is an electric Charger that fakes engine noise through a patented speaker system. Here’s how the debate has evolved from Hemi displacement to decibels.
A supercharged Hemi wasn’t the surprising part of the Charger SRT Hellcat – the stopwatch numbers were. This four-door family sedan runs 0-60 in roughly 3.6 seconds and tops out near 204 mph, numbers that would embarrass plenty of dedicated two-door muscle cars. Here’s how Dodge built a genuine supercar into a car meant for car seats.