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This 1970 AMC Javelin SST wears the Mark Donohue Signature Edition package and a shade of Big Bad Orange that’s impossible to miss, but the best part of this story belongs to its owner. Jeffrey Filz grew up two blocks from the AMC plant in Kenosha and remembers the day a brand-new Javelin first came down his street. Watch to hear him tell it in his own words.
The Ford 427 was named for a racing displacement limit rather than its true 425.98-cubic-inch size, and it earned its reputation the hard way, winning Le Mans outright in 1966 and 1967 inside the GT40, and dominating NHRA Super Stock in the Ford Thunderbolt. Ford’s single-cam Cammer variant made 616 horsepower and was so dominant that NASCAR banned it before it ever raced. Few engines in Detroit history combined that much racetrack success with that much controversy.
Chevrolet’s NASCAR entry had 71 wins to its name, but the street car it was based on was going out of production, so the race team needed a new face without touching what actually worked underneath. The Camaro ZL1 got the job in 2018, wearing new bodywork over a familiar chassis. It won the Daytona 500 on its very first attempt.
Almost nobody outside his home track knew the name John Barkley before the 1968 NHRA Winternationals in Pomona — but his run through the Stock Eliminator ranks that February weekend turned him into a name drag racing historians still repeat. This piece covers why the Winternationals carried extra weight and the underdog reputation ‘Big John’ built along the way.
A 1955 Chevy launches down the track at Pikes Peak International Raceway and then gets loose in a way that makes your stomach drop. For a few seconds the clip is genuinely alarming, which is exactly why the ending lands so hard. This is a dramatic reminder of how far drag racing safety gear has come, and why the driver was able to walk away unharmed. Watch to see the moment of relief.
The Eleanor Mustang traces back to a low-budget 1974 film, but the version everyone recognizes today came from the 2000 remake of Gone in 60 Seconds, when a fleet of 1967 fastbacks was dressed up as Pepper Gray Shelby GT500s. One of those movie cars later sold for .3 million, cementing Eleanor’s status as one of film’s most valuable cars. This 1967 G.T. 500 tribute, nicknamed the Pit Viper, takes the same starting point and deliberately goes somewhere else with it.
At one of the oldest drag strips in the country, Karen Stalba has spent 20-plus years running alcohol dragsters, cars fast enough to leave muscle cars in the dust. This weekend’s NHRA Lucas Oil Series brought 450-plus cars to historic Atco Dragway, a track with a record-setting past dating back to the 1960s. Here’s what made this South Jersey race weekend stand out.
