Chevrolet’s Camaro beat the Ford Mustang for America’s top-selling muscle car crown in September and October — then lost it right back in November, proof that this decades-old sales rivalry can flip in a single month. The same stretch also saw a lifelong Chevelle SS hunt finally pay off, a new Motor Trend show built entirely around muscle car culture, and a 560-horsepower pro-touring Camaro built by Detroit Speed. Read on for what the whole picture says about the state of muscle cars in the mid-2010s.
Posts Tagged: power
Plenty of enthusiasts talk about cutting a monthly bill and redirecting the money into a project car. Far fewer actually do it. This owner canceled cable television, broke a long cycle of buying cheap and wretched project cars, and ended up with a green 1972 Ford Ranchero from the single most transformative model year in the nameplate’s history. Read on to find out what changed that year and why it mattered.
The 1963 Impala SS looks like a full-size cruiser and, ordered correctly, was one of the fastest cars Chevrolet sold that year. The car in this Gateway Classic Cars gallery carries the rare factory dash-mounted tachometer, an option most buyers skipped and the one that tells you what the original owner intended. Read on for the engine that a pop song made famous and the aluminum trim that defines the model year.
Nissan split its 2014 GT-R into three distinct machines built on one platform: a genuinely comfortable Premium trim, a styling-focused Black Edition, and a 150-unit Track Edition with the back seats deleted entirely. All three shared a hand-built 3.8-liter twin-turbo V6 officially rated at 545 horsepower — though real-world estimates run considerably higher. With a base price near $100,000 and a claimed 2.7-second 0-62 time, the GT-R undercut plenty of pricier rivals. Read on for how the numbers broke down trim by trim.
Ford built two completely different 1969 Mustang Mach 1s that looked identical parked side by side, and most buyers had no idea which one they were driving home. Same badge, same stripe, same scooped hood, same displacement on the fender. The difference came down to a single character in the VIN. This Acapulco Blue fastback settles the question the moment its hood comes up, and the answer explains a lot about how Ford sold the Mach 1.
A Camaro Z/28 badge once meant a car built to embarrass everything else on the street. By 1980 it meant 190 horsepower, a functional hood scoop and some very loud graphics. Matt Farah drove a restored example and came away more nervous than impressed, and his complaints say a great deal about what the malaise era actually did to American muscle. Read on for what survived and what did not.
Duck X Productions’ Lights Out 7 turned South Georgia Motorsports Park into a proving ground for radial-tire cars pushing well past 2,000 horsepower, and the wheelstands that resulted became the stuff of drag racing legend. From the physics of exactly when a front end lifts to the underdog racer who showed up without a running car and left with a five-figure purse, the story behind the chaos is stranger than the clips alone let on.
When A Ford Mustang Goes Bang: Incredible Devastation Caused By Tire Blow-Out During 150MPH Dyno Run
This Mustang was deep into a 150mph dyno pull when a tire let go, turning a routine test into one of 1320video’s most-watched clips. Viewers point out the irony immediately: a dyno is supposed to be the one place a car can hit that speed with zero risk, and this one still found a way to go wrong. Watch to see exactly how violent a tire failure looks at triple-digit speed.
A routine driveway job — loading a Ford Mustang GT onto a truck — goes sideways in a DPCcars clip dramatic enough that a bystander on a hoverboard loses his balance watching it happen. Years later, viewers are still showing up in the comments to claim they were that kid. See what went wrong, and why loading a low-riding modern Mustang is trickier than it looks.
The ‘normal gearbox vs. Fast & Furious gearbox’ meme pokes fun at one of car culture’s favorite running jokes: Hollywood’s wildly exaggerated version of manual shifting. Real muscle car transmissions don’t gain power mid-shift or cycle through a dozen gears in seconds — they reward precision over theatrics. Here’s why the gap between movie shifting and a real four-speed is so much bigger than it looks on screen.
Water damage to a car doesn’t stop when the flood recedes — corrosion in the wiring and sensors can take months to surface, and a surprising number of flooded vehicles quietly reappear on the used market with a clean-looking title. Beyond the standard steps of disconnecting the battery and not starting the engine, there’s a bigger risk buyers need to know about. Here’s what actually happens to a car after it floods, and how flood damage gets hidden.
A 1969 Camaro Pro Street build from jeprostreets swaps the usual Roots blower for a screw-type PSI supercharger, runs electronic fuel injection instead of a carburetor, and stacks nitrous on top for good measure. The builder answers technical questions directly in the comments, but hasn’t yet shown the car making a pull. See the setup that has viewers asking about tuning, not just horsepower.
A 1969 Dodge Charger SE sat dormant for more than twenty years before Dylan McCool’s Backroad Garage helped move it to a new home, and the metallic blue paint and black vinyl top are still holding up better than anyone expected. It’s a documented factory 383 car, though the engine currently installed isn’t original. Viewers couldn’t stop comparing it to the General Lee — see why this rescue struck such a nerve.
A 1968 Ford Falcon left the factory with an inline six or a mild small-block and no ambitions whatsoever. The car nicknamed Dirty Bird shares the body panels and nothing else. Behind the nose sit two turbochargers large enough to see from the starting line, feeding a 449-cubic-inch small-block making a claimed 2,600 horsepower. Read on for the combination and the eighth-mile numbers it produces.
Chevrolet’s 1963 pickup redesign quietly introduced a coil-spring front suspension and the truck line’s first alternator, changes that outlasted the model itself and shaped the C/K lineup for years. The factory engine lineup topped out well below what this particular restomod carries under its hood today. Here’s how a truck originally rated at 180 horsepower ended up running a modern small-block instead.
