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At SEMA, Fullboost’s Luke tracked down Johnathan Goodwin to find out how his “electronic supercharger” — a battery-and-motor bolt-on that boosts power without hurting fuel economy — actually works, bolted to a 1957 Pontiac instead of the Hummer it had quietly been tested in months before. The same hot rodders who usually chase cubic inches were suddenly asking about kilowatts. Watch to see exactly how the E-Charger fills a turbo’s torque gap.
The crew running the Texas Grim Reaper showed up to their first no-prep event with $50,000 on the line and a 522-cubic-inch big block Corvette wearing a screw-type supercharger loud enough to make spectators cover their ears. They made the finals anyway. Here is why that combination works on a surface with no traction compound at all.
What actually makes a muscle car video worth millions of views? It’s rarely the polished restoration reveal — usually it’s the raw burnout, the drag strip near-miss, or the sound of a big-block firing up for the first time in years. Here’s a look at why this kind of content keeps climbing the most-watched charts.
Manufacturers do not normally sell cars on drag radials, but the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon arrived with 315/40R18 units developed specifically for it, each measuring 12.6 inches wide. The result was a 15 percent larger contact patch and more than double the grip of a standard Hellcat. Read on for why the tires, not the 840 horsepower, were the component that made every one of the Demon’s numbers possible.
Ford spent months teasing the next Shelby GT500 in camouflage and speculation before confirming it for the 2020 model year. Spy shots revealed a wider front track, massive Brembo brakes, and a supercharged version of the GT350’s 5.2-liter V8, while rumors pointed toward horsepower figures that dwarfed the outgoing GT500’s 662. Read on to find out how close the leaked details actually came to the car Ford eventually built.
Muscle cars and sports cars get lumped together constantly, but the real dividing line isn’t attitude — it’s a specific set of engineering decisions around displacement, weight, and chassis design made an ocean apart. A 1970 Chevelle SS454 outweighed a period Porsche 911S by more than 1,400 pounds, and that gap explains more than any horsepower figure could. Read on to find out exactly where the line falls, and why it’s gotten blurrier in the decades since.
Pontiac hasn’t built a car in years, but a Tallahassee shop called Trans Am Depot will still sell you one — by starting with a fifth-generation Camaro and spending eight weeks turning it into a Hurst Edition Trans Am tribute, gold logo, shaker hood, and all. Between the base conversion, a fully optioned Camaro donor, and a supercharger kit, the final bill can climb past $100,000. Read on to find out what that money actually buys, right down to the carbon fiber sill plates.
V8TV’s Muscle Car Of The Week pulls a 2016 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat from The Brothers Collection, shot with only 35 miles on the odometer. Viewers can’t stop talking about the supercharged whine, with one owner admitting he still smiles every time he starts his up months later. The comments turn into a running debate over Hellcat versus Camaro, versus a 392 Scat Pack Shaker manual, and even a look ahead to the Demon that hadn’t arrived yet. Watch to hear what 707 horsepower actually sounds like from the outside.
The Corvette almost didn’t survive its own first decade. Built from fiberglass because postwar steel was scarce, sold in a color palette limited to white, and slower to stop than it was to go, the original 1953 Corvette came close to cancellation before Ford’s Thunderbird forced Chevrolet’s hand. What followed was a rapid string of changes — a real V8, a fuel-injected small-block, a bored-out 327 — that turned an awkward experiment into the car GM couldn’t afford to kill. Read on to find out how it got there.