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The Porsche Boxster broke from Porsche tradition as the brand’s first production model built around a mid-mounted, water-cooled engine — and its earliest examples carried a cylinder liner flaw serious enough to worry any used buyer. Understanding what Porsche quietly fixed by 2000, and how output climbed across three distinct engine displacements, is useful context even for muscle car fans cross-shopping performance convertibles. Read on for the full mechanical breakdown.
AMC spent the late 1960s selling the Rebel as sensible family transportation, a four-door sedan, a wagon, and a hardtop built for buyers who wanted nothing flashy. Then it built The Machine: a 340-hp version of the same car, wrapped in a single red, white, and blue paint scheme with a hood-mounted tachometer. Read on to see how AMC quietly redesigned the Rebel for 1969 and 1970, and how The Machine turned an economy car into a genuine muscle car.
The Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren pairs a 617-horsepower supercharged V8 with a braking system rated to handle 2,200-degree temperatures and a rear wing that adjusts itself the instant the driver hits the brakes. From the limited-run 722S roadster to the tuner-built 722 GT pushing past 670 horsepower, this is a car built entirely around extremes. Read on for the full breakdown of what makes it one of the most technically ambitious road cars Mercedes has ever built.
The Series 2 Lotus Elise failed its U.S. headlight regulations and failed the 5 mph impact test, and it was sold in America anyway — under a three-year exemption. It went on to become what many consider the finest Lotus ever built, running a Toyota engine with a cylinder head designed by Yamaha. Read on to find out how a company famous for adding lightness ended up 187 pounds heavier and still faster than before.
Between 2008 and 2012, Maserati released version after version of the GranTurismo without ever settling on what kind of car it wanted to be — until the limited McStradale variant broke 300 km/h and answered the question for good. A Ferrari-designed V8, three different transmission strategies, and a stopping distance measured in single-digit car lengths are all part of the story. Read on to find out how a comfortable Italian coupe turned into one of the quickest GT cars of its era.
AMC’s Rebel started life in 1957 as a forgotten one-year V8 option, then reemerged a decade later as a genuine mid-size performance car that could run 0-60 in 9 seconds while still seating a family in as much room as a full-size Chevrolet. By 1968 it wore AMC’s own badge for the first time and went racing to prove it. Read on to find out how a 390-cubic-inch V8 option turned the practical Rebel SST into a genuine muscle car contender.
A Ferrari 250 California Special once owned by actor James Coburn sold for $11 million in 2008, a staggering jump from its status as a low-volume, hand-built specialty model when it debuted in 1961. Every 250-series Ferrari shared the same race-bred V12 and a weight advantage that let it out-corner faster, heavier rivals like Jaguar on the track. Read on to find out how the California Special’s siblings, the 250S, 250MM, and Monza, each carved out their own piece of Ferrari’s early competition history.
Ford’s fifth-generation Mustang solved a problem the company had struggled with for years: how to modernize an icon without losing what made it iconic in the first place. Built on an all-new platform but styled after the fastback Mustangs of the late 1960s, the 2005 redesign set the template every American pony car would follow for the next decade. Read on for the engineering decisions behind the comeback.
The Lotus Elise Series 1 built its reputation on weight, not horsepower, tipping the scales at just 725 kilograms while still running 0-60 mph in 5.8 seconds. Variants ranged from the entry-level GT1 up through the stripped-down, roofless 340R and the hardtop Exige, each pushing Lotus’s lightweight philosophy further. Read on to find out how a car this light managed to out-corner machines with twice the power.
BMW’s New Six sedans built the template for every sporty, luxurious BMW that followed — and the pivotal version, the E3 Bavaria, only exists because one persistent American dealer refused to take no for an answer. Read on to find out how a scaled-back interior and a bigger engine created the car most historians credit with starting BMW’s entire American identity.
Dodge’s 1969 Charger Daytona wore a 23-inch nose cone and a rear wing tall enough to bolt through the fenders, chasing a single goal: beating NASCAR’s fastest superspeedway cars. It worked well enough to hit 205 mph at Chrysler’s own proving ground, but only 503 were built, and just 70 got the legendary Hemi engine. Read on for the numbers behind one of muscle car history’s shortest, strangest production runs.