Before NASCAR became a household name, the Hudson Hornet was already a genuine racing dynasty, with driver Marshall Teague finishing one season with an 83 percent winning percentage most modern teams would call impossible. Decades later the car found a second life in an unexpected place — read on to find out where.
Posts Tagged: power
This custom ’34 Ford-style coupe is built around three separate Chevy 350 engines, a layout that puts it firmly in a decades-old tradition of multi-engine show cars built to turn heads rather than lap a track. The 1934 three-window coupe body remains one of the most reproduced shapes in the hot rod world, with several small manufacturers still turning out fiberglass and steel replicas today. Between the engine count and the custom leather interior, this build leans all the way into showpiece territory.
In just eighteen months, Ford transformed the full-size Galaxie from a family-oriented sedan into a NASCAR-chasing fastback packing a conservatively rated 425 horsepower. A mid-year roofline change and a top-shelf 406-cubic-inch V8 rewrote what a full-size Ford could be. Read on to find out how the 63-and-a-half Galaxie earned its nickname and its reputation on the track.
Zach Straits spent eight years bringing a neglected 1961 Ford Galaxie Starliner back to life, and the result — a 401-horsepower 390 FE-series V8 under one of Ford’s most distinctive fastback rooflines — stopped traffic at the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals in Rosemont, Illinois. Lou Costabile’s My Car Story caught the full build story on camera. Watch to see why one commenter called this the best-looking full-size Ford of its decade.
One Mustang owner had a question nobody could answer for him: does the flat-plane-crank GT350R actually beat a stock 2018 GT at the strip? At Beech Bend Dragway in Bowling Green, Kentucky, he lined up his own R-package Shelby against his own 460-horsepower GT with its 10-speed automatic to settle it once and for all. The results split opinion in the comments before the video even finished. Watch to see which philosophy — track-bred manual or drag-strip automatic — crossed the line first.
Chevrolet’s ‘W’ series big block ran into a hard power ceiling around 6,500 rpm, prompting a near-total redesign that became the Mark IV, nicknamed the ‘porcupine’ engine for its distinctive splayed valve angles. The new architecture kept key ‘W’ features like side-oiling and Moraine main bearings while dramatically improving high-rpm breathing. Read on to find out exactly what changed under the valve covers.
This 1963 Chevrolet Corvette convertible looks period-correct from ten feet away, but everything holding it together is decades newer than the body it’s wearing — a brand-new LS2 crate V8, a Bowtie Stage 3 automatic, four-wheel disc brakes, and ice-cold A/C hidden behind a frame-off restoration that took two years to complete. Vanguard Motor Sales walks through a build sheet detailed enough to make plenty of numbers-matching purists reconsider what “correct” should actually mean. Watch to see exactly what a modern restomod Corvette gets right — and what it deliberately leaves behind.
A 1969 GT500 that surfaced in Detroit in 2015 turned out to be far more than a rare production car — research confirmed it as the literal first Mustang built at Dearborn specifically for conversion into a Shelby prototype. Only four such prototypes were ever ordered. Read on for how three collectors pieced together nearly fifty years of hidden history.
Chevrolet’s postwar Advance-Design trucks hit the market a full year ahead of the competition, and by 1951 the line was refining details that collectors now prize above almost everything else — starting with the five-window cab option. New brakes, revised door windows, and a shorter cargo bed all arrived quietly that year. Here’s what made 1951 one of the more distinctive model years in the Advance-Design run.
1969 marked the last year of the original Camaro body style, and Chevrolet used it to hide some of its rarest performance options in plain sight. Behind identical SS and RS badges sat everything from a mild 350 small-block to a barely-advertised 427 built for the drag strip. Only a handful of buyers knew enough to ask for the right code on the order form. These photos, courtesy of Gateway Classic Cars, capture one of the last true first-generation Camaros before the redesign.
This 1959 Lincoln Continental Mark IV represents Lincoln at its most luxurious, and its most cautious, after toning down a wild 1958 redesign just one year later. Only 2,195 convertibles like this one were built, powered by a 430 V8 making 350 hp. Here’s the story behind one of the rarest personal luxury cars of its era.
A 1971 Buick GS Stage 1 Convertible, described as looking just as it did the day it left the showroom, gets the full 4K treatment at the Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals. Buick’s factory performance package turned this GS into a genuine competitor against Chevelle SS and GTO buyers of its era. Watch to see a rare survivor convertible that barely shows its age.
David Meyer’s 1966 Plymouth Belvedere, built by coachbuilder Troy Trepanier and nicknamed “Northern Bel,” hides a 526-cubic-inch HEMI and twin rear-mounted turbochargers behind period-correct sheet metal. Featured on MotorTrend’s House of Muscle series, the restomod is reported to run 9-second quarter-miles at over 200 mph. Watch to see how a stock-looking ’66 Mopar hides that much firepower.
Only twenty buyers checked the box for Chevrolet’s most serious 1967 Corvette engine option, and the horsepower figure on the window sticker was deliberately understated. This custom convertible takes that same idea and reworks it with five decades of engineering the original buyers never had, wrapped in a paint color that did not exist when the car was built. Shark Gray over black, a modified 427 Z06-based engine, and a question every restomod eventually has to answer. Read on for where the line actually sits.
New emissions rules were reshaping every engine bay in Detroit by 1975, and the Pontiac LeMans found itself right in the middle of that shift — still offering a genuine 400-cubic-inch V8 alongside its first catalytic converter. Here’s how Pontiac balanced compliance and horsepower in one of the most transitional model years of the era, plus a closer look at the car pictured here.
