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Jeff Lutz’s twin-turbo, 3,000-horsepower ’57 Chevy squared off again against Alex Taylor’s street-driven ’55 at the 2026 Tri-Five Nationals — and the power gap didn’t tell the whole story. Fans who expected a lopsided pass instead got a race close enough to argue about for days. Here’s what makes these two Tri-Five builds, and the family history behind them, worth knowing.
A 1972 Chevy Nova that spent four decades sinking into the dirt gets a second chance in Hagerty’s newest budget build. Restoration duo Dustin Hallinan and John Brito set themselves a brutal number: bring it back to life for less than $5,000. What they find underneath says a lot about what’s still possible in today’s classic car market.
Off a quiet road in Melbourne, Florida sits a 123,000-square-foot building holding more than 420 American muscle cars insured at an estimated $32 million — and it’s barely open to the public. One YouTuber talked his way inside for a full walkthrough that’s since pulled in over 3 million views. The collector behind it made his fortune in pet pharmaceuticals, not cars, and built the place to stop history from disappearing. Read on to find out how veterans get in free.
The 1966 Toronado was the first front-wheel-drive American car in almost 30 years, and Oldsmobile packed it with oddities nobody else was building: a speedometer drum that rolls like a slot machine, headlights that disappear, and a completely flat floor. An 18-minute walkaround of a stunning survivor shows every one of them up close.
Chevrolet’s cheapest full-size car could be ordered with the 425-horsepower L72 427, the strongest engine the brand sold in 1966, and only 1,856 of those engines went into the entire big-car line. Muscle Car Campy drives a factory-correct example and then hands the keys to a 454 resto-mod built on the same plain-sedan formula.
The 1970 AMC Rebel Machine put 340 horsepower and 430 lb-ft of 390 V8 torque into a mid-size body for ,475, ran a 14.4-second quarter mile, and wore a hood scoop with the tachometer mounted inside it. AMC built 2,326 and never made another. Here is why the smallest automaker in Detroit’s boldest muscle car vanished after one year.
A YouTuber dropped a supercharged Hellcat V8 into his 1968 Dodge Charger chasing 1,500 horsepower, and the swap didn’t go quietly — the torque twisted the chassis off the line and blew the supercharger’s intake apart before the video even wrapped. Here’s the story behind ‘Tater,’ one of the wilder modern Mopar engine swaps making the rounds this year.
A dust-covered 1963 Corvette Sting Ray came out of a barn on a detailing channel — and viewers immediately recognized it as one of the rarest Corvettes ever built. Its split rear window lasted exactly one model year before GM killed it, and today it drives six-figure auction prices. But it was the story behind the car’s owner, surfaced entirely in the comments, that turned 587,000 views into something closer to a tribute.
A numbers-matching 1979 Pontiac Trans Am Special Edition, the black-and-gold Bandit car everyone remembers from the movies, just got the full walkaround treatment. Turns out the actual Smokey and the Bandit stunt cars werent real 1977 models at all, and depending on which V8 landed under this ones shaker scoop, it might not even be the strongest Trans Am Pontiac built that year.
A crew called B is for Build stripped a 2019 Mustang GT down to its chassis and wrapped it in reproduction 1967 Fastback panels, racing a two-week deadline to debut it at SEMA as a Shelby GT500 tribute. The real 1967 GT500 was already rare — Ford built only 2,048. This one borrows its look, not its lineage, and viewers can’t stop asking how the crew pulled it off in time.
A 1964 Mercury Marauder with the factory-rare dual-quad 427 — one of just 42 built that year — turned up at a Detroit car show still owned by the same man for two decades. Nick Zakarian’s fastback-roofed big Mercury hides one of the rarest engine options Ford Motor Company ever sold. Here’s the NASCAR-bred history behind the nameplate most muscle car fans have forgotten.
A factory Hemi Road Runner is rare enough on its own, but this 1970 hardtop belongs to an even smaller club: cars built with Chrysler’s TorqueFlite automatic instead of the four-speed most Hemi buyers demanded. MotoManTV takes it for a drive during a 2015 Classic Car Week special, digging into why Plymouth’s rarest drivetrain pairing almost never got ordered at all.
A 1968 Pontiac GTO that had sat gutted since its rescue a year earlier got one shot at redemption: a fresh engine, brakes, wheels, cooling and fuel systems, or nothing. The Build Season crew gave themselves three days and a drive home to prove it could still run. Here’s how close the goat came to missing its own deadline.