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Gearhead Garage breaks down 11 of the most common muscle car upgrades that actually hurt performance, safety, or resale value — from oversized wheels to spool rear ends. Some of these mods are things owners save years to install. According to this list, that might be the problem. Watch Part 1 to see the full breakdown.
A top-of-the-line 1974 Dodge Charger SE with a 440 under the hood and a set of quarter windows unlike anything else on the lot — Victoria Friday’s ride sits at the crossroads of the Charger’s Bullitt-era fame and Detroit’s mid-1970s retreat from raw horsepower. Read on to see what actually separated the SE from an ordinary Charger, and why the 440 badge still mattered in a year emissions rules were choking performance everywhere else.
Each November, automotive archeologist Ryan Brutt assembles roughly 25 to 30 of the rarest unrestored muscle cars in the country for the Barn Finds & Hidden Gems display at MCACN. The 2016 lineup included a NASCAR homologation Charger 500, a factory GTO funny car, and a turbocharged 1962 Oldsmobile Jetfire. What sets the section apart isn’t just rarity, it’s the documented story behind every single survivor.
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.
Only about 19,000 were ever built, it was the only American two-seater besides the Corvette for three straight years, and it once beat a GTO off the line badly enough that the loser still remembers it fifty years later. The Drive’s /DRIVE+ team goes looking for why AMC’s smallest, lightest muscle car never got its due — and finds a fiercely loyal handful of owners who never stopped arguing it deserved better. What made this car so easy to overlook and so hard to forget?
Lokar’s Muscle Car Shifter Knob is built to replicate the look and feel of a factory GM shifter closely enough to fool most people at a car show, and it won SEMA’s award for Best New Interior Accessory Product. The install is quick but order-dependent: the shifter must be in Park, the set screw inside the knob stays untouched, and the adapter housing has to be held steady while tightening. Read on for exactly how to avoid the mistakes first-timers make.
The 1967 Chevrolet Impala SS pictured here now runs a 350-cubic-inch V8 and two-speed Powerglide automatic — a later swap, since Chevy didn’t offer the 350 in a full-size car until 1969 — wrapped in Chevy’s freshly redesigned Coke-bottle bodywork. It also carries newly mandated safety features like an energy-absorbing steering column and front shoulder straps, arriving the same year Detroit was forced to start engineering for survival, not just speed. Here’s what made this particular model year such a turning point for the Impala nameplate.
When Bennie Horton turned eighteen, his father handed him more than a graduation gift — he handed him a 1965 Ford Mustang GT Convertible in Silver Smoke Gray the family had owned since new. Four years ago, Bennie gave the car the restoration it deserved, and today it carries a story most owners can only dream of: a documented lineage, a decades-old photograph held by an uncle who’s never seen the finished car, and a family that never let it go.
In a stretch of the French Riviera built around Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, and Lamborghinis, one filmmaker spent years documenting a surprising pattern: nothing turns heads in Monaco and Cannes quite like an American V8. From an El Camino stealing the show early on to a Cadillac out-shining a line of Rolls-Royces, this compilation makes the case one reaction shot at a time. Watch to see which American muscle car gets the loudest reaction.
Mecum’s January 2016 Kissimmee auction closed with more than 91 million dollars in sales across ten days, led by four Hemi-powered Mopar convertibles that combined for over 7.5 million dollars. A 78 percent sell-through rate and a 30 percent year-over-year jump in totals made it the highest-grossing sale in company history. See the full top-10 list and what each car brought.
Long before Hollywood made it famous in Bullitt and The Dukes of Hazzard, the 1968-1970 Dodge Charger R/T had already earned its reputation the hard way — with a 440 Magnum standard, an optional 426 Hemi, and a coke-bottle body that still defines muscle car styling today. Read on for what the R/T badge actually meant under the sheet metal.
Beyond the well-known bargains, plenty of affordable muscle car ownership still hides in plain sight. Cars like the Chevrolet Nova, Dodge Dart Sport, and Buick Skylark deliver real small-block performance for a fraction of what a comparable Camaro or Mustang costs. The simple reason: fewer buyers chase these badges, which keeps demand, and prices, refreshingly low.
The 1949 Oldsmobile 98 Holiday paired a landmark body style, one of the first hardtop coupes GM ever built, with only 3,006 produced, with an engine that changed the industry outright: the 303-cubic-inch Rocket V-8, the first mass-produced overhead-valve V-8 in America. Together they cut 10-to-60 mph times by 4.6 seconds over the prior year’s car and helped kick off the horsepower race that would define American muscle cars for decades to come.
The Camaro arrived as a reaction to somebody else’s idea, sold fewer cars than its rival for nearly every year of its life, and spent fourteen years out of production entirely. Somehow it still owns more garage-wall real estate, more aftermarket catalog pages, and more restomod builds than anything else in the American performance canon. Read on for how a car that lost the sales war ended up winning the argument that actually matters.