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Posts Tagged: power

Roadkill’s David Freiburger and Mike Finnegan take delivery of a 707-horsepower Challenger Hellcat, a 707-horsepower Charger Hellcat, and a 645-horsepower Viper GT straight from Dodge, then head for a motocross track with zero regard for what any of these cars were actually built to do. With guest appearances from Motor Trend, Dirt Every Day, and a professional drifter, this episode marked the start of Dodge’s sponsorship — and it shows exactly why the partnership worked. Watch to see 2,059 combined horsepower meet terrain built for dirt bikes.

Ford’s own paperwork undersold this 1969 Mustang GT the moment it left the factory. The 428 Cobra Jet carried an official 335-horsepower rating that engineers knew was fiction, chosen to keep the car out of the insurance industry’s crosshairs. Add a convertible body, a rare Indian Fire paint code, and a factory power top, and you have a combination Ford built fewer than thirty times. The registry that tracks them can confirm four survivors.

Only three Caterham R500 EVOs were ever built, and each one cost 42,000 British pounds — around $69,000 — without a heater or any other comfort you might reasonably expect. One of them went out and left a Ferrari Enzo behind. The Enzo cost roughly ten times as much. Read on to find out how a company that started with a Lotus parts license ended up embarrassing Maranello.

Larry F. bought his first car in 1977 for $400: a white 1970 Pontiac GTO that broke his father’s one rule about first cars. He spent two years rebuilding it, drove it for years, and sold it in 1988 for $800 before the muscle car market took off. Years later, walking through an Illinois junkyard with his son, he found out exactly what became of it. Read on to find out what he saw.

POWERNATION’s Detroit Muscle crew takes on Project Ultra Violet, a 1970 Dodge Challenger so rusted it needs sandblasting before the real work can even begin. What follows is a uni-body-to-full-frame conversion built around a Jeff Schwartz G-Machine chassis and a low-deck, all-aluminum Hemi backed by a T56 six-speed. This is not a preserved survivor — it’s a genuine rust-bucket resurrection. Watch to see how far the team pushes it.

It looks like it belongs at a WWII reenactment, not lining up against a 638-horsepower supercharged Corvette, yet this LS-swapped Willys Jeep just added a nitrous shot to an already potent combination and started pulling its front wheels off the pavement. The result: a boxy, aerodynamically hopeless off-roader hunting down one of the quickest factory Corvettes ever built on a public street. Some viewers are cheering the power-to-weight absurdity; others are asking pointed questions about roll cages. Either way, five million-plus views suggest this ugly-duckling street racer isnt done making noise.

The combustion chamber that made Chrysler famous was never Chrysler’s invention, and the company’s first hemispherical engine was not designed for a car at all. It was drawn for a fighter plane, then refined in a tank, and it reached showrooms in 1951 wearing a name that had nothing to do with geometry. Read on to find out how a wartime experiment became the most valuable four letters in American performance.

A video titled ‘1977 Dodge Charger R/T’ immediately drew skepticism in its own comment section, with viewers pointing out that Dodge never sold an R/T-badged Charger in the U.S. by 1977 — pointing instead to Chrysler’s Australian, Canadian, or South American operations as the likely real source. The mystery of exactly which regional Mopar plant built this car turns out to be more interesting than a standard restoration walkthrough. Watch the full review and see if you can spot the clues the comments picked up on.

This 1967 Camaro pairs a deceptively restrained exterior and factory houndstooth interior with a 502-horsepower ZZ502 crate engine, filmed in detail at Fast Lane Classic Cars in Missouri. A Borg Warner four-speed and 12-bolt rear handle the power, while front disc brakes and modern tires keep it planted. Commenters can’t stop calling it a dream car. Watch the full walkaround to see what 502 horsepower looks like in a car that doesn’t announce itself.

This Iris Mist 1965 Pontiac GTO carries the 389 Tri-Power, a four-speed, and a rotisserie restoration that leaves nothing to argue about. It also carries an option General Motors was about to take away from every division except Chevrolet’s Corvette, which is exactly why fewer than a third of that year’s GTOs have it. Read on to find out what those three carburetors were really worth.

The 2017 Ford Mustang GT did not win its reputation by having the biggest horsepower number in the showroom, because it did not have it. The Camaro SS made more, the Hellcat made far more, and Ford’s own Shelby GT350 made nearly a hundred more. Yet reviewers kept coming back to the 435-horsepower 5.0 as the one that got the whole formula right. Read on to find out what Ford changed around the engine.

Chevrolet’s 2019 Corvette ZR1 arrived after years of speculation, packing a supercharged LT5 V8 and the largest rear wing ever offered on a production Corvette. This breakdown covers the details that turned rumor into one of the most respected Corvette generations among enthusiasts. Fans in the comments call it nothing short of Big Nasty. Watch to see why the nickname stuck.

Rory Carroll edits Autoweek from Detroit, but his own car story starts in the orchards of northern Michigan and runs straight through a welded-shut door at the 24 Hours of Lemons. In this conversation with host Pat Caporuscio, Carroll traces his path from a cherry-country childhood to one of the industry’s most recognized editorial chairs, and explains why an editor who still races tells a different kind of story. Read on to find out what shaped his eye for the muscle car world.

A nitro Top Fuel car has no transmission and no gear changes, which means the clutch alone meters roughly eleven thousand horsepower to the tires across the entire run. It is tuned by adding and removing steel counterweights measured in grams, runs at friction temperatures near 3,700 degrees, and gets rebuilt between nearly every round. Here is how the system actually works, and why the clutch is where a nitro race is really won.

A 2017 Ford GT and a 2017 Camaro ZL1 share a track session where both drivers admit it’s their first time turning laps in either car. What follows splits viewers almost evenly between the GT’s raw numbers and the ZL1’s value-driven performance, with the onboard telemetry revealing more about driver skill than either car’s spec sheet. The comment section still hasn’t settled the debate.

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