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American Motors built the Ambassador as its flagship for eighteen model years, and 1966 was the year the gamble finally paid off, with sales climbing to roughly 71,000 from under 19,000 just two years earlier. The DPL hardtop sat at the very top of that range with reclining buckets and AMC’s largest V8. Here is why an unrestored survivor from a brand this overlooked is genuinely harder to find than a big-name muscle car.
The Auto Rules wanted to answer a question every backyard mechanic has joked about: can you supercharge an engine with a leaf blower? The answer, tested on a 5.4-liter V8, isn’t a simple yes or no — there’s no real boost involved, yet the dyno still showed a gain. Commenters are already lobbying for a turbocharged leaf blower as the sequel. Watch to see exactly how many horsepower a cheap tool can buy.
GM’s 1971 switch to low-lead fuel dropped the Buick 455’s compression from 10.0:1 to 8.5:1, and the Stage 1 rating fell from 360 horsepower to 345. Buick built the car anyway, with a hotter camshaft, larger valves, a recalibrated Quadrajet and 3.42 Positraction as standard, and roughly 81 of them left the factory as convertibles. Period tests still recorded mid-13-second quarter miles. Read on for what a genuine Stage 1 has to prove before you write the check.
Back-to-back fuel crises in 1973 and 1979 forced Pontiac to rethink the Trans-Am from the ground up, and the result was a 1982 redesign built almost entirely around wind tunnel data — roughly 500 pounds lighter, capable of 34 mpg with the four-cylinder engine, and styled with hidden headlights and a frameless rear window. Read on to see how that fuel-crisis compromise eventually turned into the fastest production car in North America.
The Fab Forums picks up a die grinder and starts reshaping a stock intake manifold’s runners in real time, explaining exactly why port-matching — not just polishing things smooth — is the technique that actually adds power. It’s raw, unscripted shop footage rather than a polished tutorial, showing the kind of decision-making that separates a home porting job that works from one that just looks like it should. Watch the process unfold bit by bit.
Alf’s 1965 Chevy II Nova SS still wears its original California dealer plates, decades after Hovey-Dallas Chevrolet first sold it — only now it’s a familiar sight near Seaview Road outside Adelaide, Australia, following a 2008 import. The car runs its factory 283 V8 and PowerGlide transmission, kept close to stock except for dual Flowmaster mufflers and a fresh set of mags. Read on to see how a documented, three-owner Nova crossed an ocean and stayed true to its roots.
Restomod builders spend years blending classic muscle car looks with modern reliability, and then Dodge handed shoppers a finished version of that dream on a new-car lot. The Challenger held its retro shape for its entire production run while Mustang and Camaro moved on. So what was actually still missing from it? Read on for the case enthusiasts made, the answers Dodge gave instead, and how the argument ended.
Ford loyalists and Chevrolet diehards have been arguing about the 5.0-liter Mustang and the TPI Camaro since both cars were new, and the argument has never actually been settled with the engines on a dyno. That is exactly what this shootout sets out to do, starting with baseline pulls on a 5.0L HO 302 and an LB9 TPI 305. The numbers are smaller than modern muscle. Read on to find out what these two engines really made.
A Precision 98mm turbocharger is roughly the size of a dinner plate, and bolted to a small-block Ford it turned this Cobra into a 2,200-horsepower payday worth $12,500. Getting a street-based V8 to survive that kind of boost means rebuilding the engine around the turbo rather than the other way around. Here is what actually goes into a build like this one.
Enthusiasts have called the third-generation Thunderbird the Bullet Bird for sixty years, and the nickname has nothing to do with how fast it was. It described the shape. This 1963, built by Manns Restoration and named Black Bullet, takes that missile-shaped body and fills the engine bay with a modern DOHC Coyote V8, a 9-inch rear on 4.11 gears, and Wilwood discs at all four corners. Here is why the Bullet Bird is such a good canvas.
A 1967 Corvette carrying the top-of-the-line L71 427, a 435-horsepower solid-lifter tri-power big block, sat parked and forgotten for nearly 40 years before finally resurfacing with just 25,000 original miles. Commenters who have owned or ridden in identical cars are still trading stories about what this engine could really do. Watch the recovery of a Corvette that time genuinely forgot.
Long before this restomod’s ceramic headers and chrome mags, the 1932 Ford roadster had already become the battleground for hot rodding’s biggest debate: Ford body, Chevy heart. Once the small-block Chevy V8 proved itself in the mid-1950s, legendary builds swapped out their Ford flatheads, and this build carries that same tradition forward.
Long before Detroit’s muscle car wars, two Indiana blacksmiths built a company that would eventually produce one of the era’s most overlooked performance machines. The Studebaker brothers started with horseshoes, survived a Civil War wagon contract, and only reluctantly entered the automobile business decades later. Their company’s final act included a supercharged V8 capable of matching contemporaries from Detroit’s Big Three. It simply ran out of time to prove it.
This 1965 Chevy pickup carries two superchargers under its hood, but ScottieDTV takes it somewhere you wouldn’t expect a build like this to go: a quiet cruise up a spur road into the Smoky Mountains. The truck behaves itself for most of the drive, restrained and civil, right up until a highway tunnel gives the driver an excuse to let both blowers do what they were built for. It’s a reminder that a serious powertrain doesn’t need a track to make its case.
This 1970 Camaro started life as an ordinary factory 350 SS before a trip to the Dick Harrell Performance Center turned it into a 454-powered rarity, and it survives today unrestored, with roughly 6,000 original miles. Commenters pick apart everything from its likely 4.88:1 rear gear to whether those tires are period-correct. See the full breakdown of one of the Brothers Collection’s standout cars.