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Only one 1969 Trans Am ever left Pontiac’s factory with a race-bred Ram Air V under its hood, built purely to test a car nobody planned to sell. From that single engineering mule to the 335-horsepower 455 HO of 1971 and the Super Duty that closed out the era in 1974, these are the rarest Trans Am engine programs collectors still track down decades later.
A fourth-generation Pontiac Firebird Trans Am hides a Corvette-derived LS1 V8 under a body style most collectors still overlook. Owners in the comments back the pitch up with odometers past a quarter-million miles. Here is why a mechanic with over five decades on the job calls it the smartest cheap muscle car buy left.
This nearly-finished 1978 Pontiac Trans Am restoration wears the black-and-gold look every Bandit fan recognizes, but its real story is more complicated than the movie fame suggests. From the W72 400 under the hood to the WS6 handling package and the Y82 Special Edition trim, here’s what actually made this car an icon. Read on to find out what set a genuine survivor apart from the thousands of clones that followed.
Pontiac rebuilt the Firebird four separate times in 35 years, surviving two gas crises and a movie-fueled sales boom that forced GM to delay an entire redesign. This retrospective traces every generation, from the 325-hp 1967 Ram Air 400 to the record-setting late-90s WS6 Trans Ams, right up to the federal safety rule that finally ended the run in 2002.
Only five 1970 Plymouth ‘Cuda AARs were ever finished in FT6 Burnt Tan, and only two are known to survive. V8TV’s Muscle Car of the Week profiles the rare homologation special built so Plymouth could legally race the ‘Cuda in SCCA Trans Am — complete with a triple-carbureted 340, side-exit exhaust, and a rulebook-driven design most casual fans never notice.
The 400 small-block is mostly remembered for something almost embarrassing: which parts from other small-blocks will not bolt onto it. This guide traces Chevrolet’s 4.0-inch bore small-block family — the race-bred 302, the ubiquitous 350, and the siamese-bore 400 — and explains the external-balance quirk that catches out first-time engine swappers. Read on to find out how to tell these engines apart before you buy or build one.
Pontiac built just 8 convertible versions of its brand-new 1969 Trans Am, all equipped with the top-tier Ram Air III engine, out of a total production run of only 697 cars. The body style then disappeared from the Trans Am lineup for decades, leaving these eight cars in a strange, isolated place in Pontiac history. Read on to find out why price guides barely apply to a population this small.
At the 2017 New York Auto Show, a small Florida company stole attention away from every major manufacturer with a car that technically should not exist: a modern Trans Am making roughly 1,000 horsepower from a NASCAR-engineered 455 big-block. Built on a Camaro-based chassis and priced well into six figures, it is less a restoration than a full continuation of Pontiac’s most legendary nameplate. Read on to find out what your money actually buys.
The Pontiac Trans Am WS6 package started as a simple order-form checkbox, but it transformed a standard fourth-gen Firebird into the sharpest-handling version Pontiac ever built. This detailed Cars & Bids review, viewed nearly 288,000 times, walks through every quirk from the functional hood scoops to the notoriously cheap interior. Watch to see what that $3,290 checkbox actually bought.
Everyone talks about the six-figure Hemi cars crossing the block at Mecum — but what does an actually affordable muscle car cost in 2026? Ultimate Muscle Car walked the Harrisburg auction floor pricing out Valiants, Novas, Catalinas, and Firebirds instead of the headline cars, and uncovered a real debate about who’s still buying these cars as the generation that grew up with them ages out of the hobby. Watch to see what real money actually buys right now.
A black Pontiac Trans Am shared the screen with Burt Reynolds in 1977’s Smokey and the Bandit, and two years later Pontiac moved 117,108 of them in a single model year. Two decades later, the LS1-powered WS6 Trans Am was faster and better built than ever — and GM killed it anyway. Top Tier Motors traces the cancellation back to four competing forces inside and outside General Motors, none of which had anything to do with the car actually failing to sell.
A forgotten 1978 movie chase pairing a detuned Trans Am against a transitional C3 Corvette earned a rare four-star rating from a dedicated film-preservation channel. Both cars represent very different Detroit performance philosophies from the same turbulent era. Find out why this overlooked scene still holds up decades later, and what made 1973 such a pivotal year for the Corvette’s design.
Jay Leno sits down with AMC historian Mark Fletcher and his 1970 Javelin Mark Donohue Edition — a homologation special AMC built exactly 2,501 of, one more than the racing rules required. Fletcher’s own philosophy on car ownership, ‘I’m not collecting trophies, I’m collecting smiles,’ has become one of the most quoted lines in the show’s history. Watch the full conversation above.