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The Oldsmobile Toronado’s revolutionary front-wheel-drive layout started as an unsanctioned design sketch in 1962, years before Oldsmobile’s engineers had even finished the seven-year development and 1.5 million miles of testing needed to make it real. The result was the first American front-wheel-drive car since the 1930s, wrapped in one of GM’s most dramatic body designs of the decade. Here’s the story behind the sketch that reshaped an entire division’s engineering priorities.
The 1983 Fox-body Mustang GLX convertible almost never happened the way people assume — Ford shipped brand-new coupes out to a contractor just to get the top cut off and a folding roof installed. Add a four-barrel carb that boosted the 5.0 V8 by nearly fifty horsepower, and you have got a genuinely underappreciated turning point in Mustang history hiding behind a badge nobody talks about.
TwinRodders returns to the Fairplex in Pomona for the O’Reilly Auto Parts Street Machine & Muscle Car Nationals, capturing everything from a Pro Street 1968 Camaro to a blown-Hemi 1963 Dodge Polara to an Oldsmobile 442 fresh off the burnout contest. A slight chance of rain didn’t keep the fairgrounds from filling with muscle car history. Watch the full walkthrough to see what else made the cut.
A supercharged Ford GT making an estimated 700 horsepower lines up against a Toyota Supra pushing 570 wheel horsepower on a completely stock motor. One car has a factory-bred chassis and forged wheels; the other is proving what a 2JZ can survive under 28 psi of boost. See which one actually gets to the stripe first.
Pontiac let the Camaro launch five months first in 1966 just so Firebird engineers could fix what Chevy got wrong — better weight balance, standard traction bars, real attention to detail. Buyers had a genuine choice in 1967 between a clever overhead-cam Sprint six and GTO-sourced 400 V8 muscle, and the sales numbers make it obvious which one actually won.
Scott Cawley’s 1950 Studebaker still wears the polarizing bullet nose that made strangers ask which direction the car was actually driving, but this one skips the trailer-queen treatment most survivors get. An updated suspension and a modern engine swap keep it as a genuine daily driver, seventy years after Studebaker’s gamble on Raymond Loewy’s design became the best-selling year in company history. Read on to see what made the design so divisive in the first place.
Somewhere between a factory-correct 1966 Mustang and a full-blown pro-touring build sits this GT restomod, nicknamed “Stylin’ Stang” by its builder. It keeps the silhouette everyone recognizes from the first Mustang generation while quietly swapping in the kind of running gear the original GT package could only dream about. Read on to find out where the line between preservation and reinvention gets drawn on a car this iconic.
Pontiac built only eight 1969 Trans Am convertibles, and V8TV’s Muscle Car of the Week caught up with the very first one ever produced — RAIII 400 power, a rare blue interior, and options like power windows that were unusual for a car built primarily as an SCCA homologation special. Restorer Gary Riley walks through the car’s history from the floor of the 2015 Muscle Car and Corvette Nationals. Even in the comments, collectors still disagree on the exact production numbers. Watch to see what makes this one of the rarest Trans Ams ever built.
Ford built exactly 57 of these R-code Fairlanes in 1966, not for showroom sales, but to satisfy a NASCAR homologation rule requiring a minimum production run. Every one wore the same white-over-black color combination and hid a 427 side-oiler under a stripped-down interior. Only about 25 are believed to survive. Here is the story behind Ford’s rarest mid-size muscle car.
Filmed on the lot at Garrett Classics in Lewisville, Texas, this 1966 Pontiac GTO wears the setup serious muscle car buyers wanted most: a 389-cubic-inch V8 with Tri-Power carburetion and a genuine four-speed manual. Factory power brakes, power steering, and correct Rally wheels round out a car Pontiac loyalists in the comments call one of the best-preserved examples they’ve seen. It’s unrestored, unmodified, and exactly as honest as a 1966 GTO should be.
Greening Auto Company built this 1970 Chevrolet Camaro around a Mast Motorsports supercharged LS7 pushing roughly 800 horsepower, sent to the pavement through a paddle-shift automatic and, surprisingly, a Ford rear differential. The body mods are subtle by design, a relocated gas filler, mirror-integrated turn signals, carbon fiber accents, meant to reward a closer look rather than shout for attention. Commenters compared the hood bulge to everything from a Grand National to a 1968 427 SS. Why would a Chevy-focused shop reach for a Ford part on a build this ambitious?
This 1985 Chevrolet El Camino crossed a strange threshold: old enough to be called a classic, but built for buyers who still saw it as a practical work vehicle rather than a collectible. Nicknamed the Cowboy Cadillac for straddling truck and car in equal measure, it carries original paint, original bench seating, and a full comfort-options sheet, plus a GM Goodwrench 350 crate engine standing in for whatever came from the factory. Read on for what made this coupe-utility, and its unlikely nickname, last eight years longer than its closest rival.
This blown alcohol engine was mid-pull on ALEXort2007’s dyno when something let go — and the comments have been debating exactly what ever since. Was it a dropped rod, an electrical arc, or a motor simply held at redline too long? Whatever the cause, one thing everyone agrees on: it’s a far better place for an engine to fail than in the middle of a quarter-mile pass.
As Dodge wound down production of its most unhinged sports car, D3 Performance Engineering decided the Viper deserved a proper send-off. Starting with a track-focused Gen V ACR, the shop added an F1X Procharger and a Nitrous Express kit to push the V10 past 900 horsepower, then took the car to the most demanding stretch of asphalt in the world to prove it. The result: D3 now holds the record for the quickest Gen V Viper on earth.
This 1966 Pontiac GTO convertible carries PHS documentation tracing it back to Moody Pontiac in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and it left the factory with the 389 four-barrel, power steering, power brakes and factory air conditioning. 1966 was the year the GTO stopped being an option package and became a model in its own right, and buyers responded by making it the best-selling muscle car in America. The convertible was always the scarcer half of that story. Read on for what separates a documented survivor from the clones.