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A heavily built Shelby GT500 pushing an estimated 1,500 horsepower squares off with a 1,200-horsepower Camaro ZL1 in a straight-line showdown. Both cars started as factory monsters before their owners pushed them into a different league entirely, and the pairing revives a rivalry that dates back to 1967.
The 1963 Studebaker Avanti R2 wrapped a Paxton-supercharged 289 making 289 horsepower in a Raymond Loewy fiberglass body, and Studebaker sold it as the world’s fastest production car. Hemmings’ Mike Musto asks whether the last new car out of South Bend was America’s first muscle car — or its most beautiful misfire.
This Chevy Nova looks like exactly what it is on the outside — a garage-built driver car with old-school flavor and nothing flashy about it. What’s hiding underneath is a supercharged LSA V8 putting down a dyno-verified 557 horsepower to the rear wheels, with an estimated 650 to 700 at the crank. It’s the kind of sleeper that wins by surprise, not spec sheet. Watch to see what happens when the supercharger whine finally gives it away.
This ’67 Camaro is running a 454 big block Chevy never actually put in a first-gen car from the factory – the real number was a 396, and the 454 didn’t arrive until 1970, reserved for Chevelles and Corvettes. So how’d it end up here, supercharged and ready to embarrass cars three decades newer? Turns out builders have been chasing this exact combination for decades, and the reason why says everything about what muscle car fans really want.
An Estonian builder captures the exact moment a freshly assembled, supercharged 440 big-block fires for the first time, destined for a 1973 Dodge Charger R/T. It’s the moment that either validates months of build work or reveals a costly problem, and the aggressive idle that follows makes clear which one this was. Hear what a genuinely blown Mopar big-block sounds like before it’s even been tuned.
At an RT66 Test N Tune event in 2015, Rich Kent’s E85-fueled 1962 Mercury Comet did something a brand-new 707-horsepower Dodge Challenger Hellcat never expected: it beat it clean off the line. The video’s own description reveals the Hellcat had run nearly three seconds quicker just a week earlier, turning a simple grudge race into a years-long argument about driving versus horsepower. Watch to see the run that started the controversy.
A modified C6 Corvette is laying down eighth-mile passes in under four seconds at 193 mph, numbers that belong to professional doorslammer classes rather than a car still wearing a production body. Getting there means a built bottom end, forced induction stacked in ways most street builds never attempt, and a fuel system built to survive numbers most engines can only dream about. Read on to find out what it actually takes — and what it costs — to push a small-block Corvette platform into four-digit horsepower territory.
A brand new Challenger build from Craven Performance in St. Peters, Missouri had been running for only a couple of days when RamblinAround caught up with it at Mega Mopar weekend. Under the hood sits a fuel injected, 10-71 supercharged 572 Hemi the shop expects to clear 1200 horsepower once it hits a dyno. No numbers yet, no track pass logged, just a blower poking through the hood and a sound that already turned heads in the parking lot.
In November 2016, a Ford F-450 reclaimed the Guinness World Record for Largest Flag Pulled by a Moving Vehicle, towing a 4,124-square-foot American flag around Homestead-Miami Speedway to beat a Chevrolet Silverado’s earlier record by nearly 1,000 square feet. The Super Duty’s 440-horsepower, 925-lb-ft Power Stroke diesel V-8 got credit for the pull, which stretched well past the minimum distance required to set the new mark. It’s proof that truck bragging rights aren’t only settled at the drag strip.
A Camaro RS met a supercharged, 1,000-horsepower Corvette in a roll race, and the one-word title says how it went. This piece breaks down why the horsepower math almost never favors the RS in matchups like this, what it actually costs to push a Corvette to four-digit power, and why grudge races like this one have become such a fixture of car meet culture.
From twenty feet away this is a clean 1966 Corvette Sting Ray. Lift the hood and you find a supercharged 454 big-block, an engine Chevrolet would not put into production for another four years, topped with fuel injection and custom tuned by Craven Performance. It is the kind of build that forces every C2 purist to decide where modified ends and something else begins. Read on for what it took to make it work.
Only two of these were ever built, and this 1957 Ford Ranchero hides one of the most unlikely muscle car secrets of the entire decade under its work-truck sheet metal. V8TV’s Muscle Car of the Week goes looking for the story behind a supercharged engine nobody expected to find in a Ranchero, and the NASCAR connection that explains how it got there.