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In 1981, Pontiac answered a shrinking performance budget with a genuinely strange idea: the first mass-production turbocharged V8 in an American car, wrapped in the loudest graphics package the Trans Am ever wore. The 210-horsepower engine was groundbreaking and unreliable in roughly equal measure, and reviewers are still divided on whether the gamble paid off. Read on to find out why collectors now pay a premium for the rare survivors that got it right.
Ford built one of its best naturally aspirated V8s for the SVT Mustang Cobra and Ford GT, then quietly dropped variants of it into a Lincoln and a Mercury that almost nobody cross-shops for performance. The used market still hasn’t caught up to what’s actually under the hood of these cars. Read on to find out which two overlooked models carry genuine Cobra-engine credentials for a fraction of Mustang money, and what to check before buying one.
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.
Chevrolet built only about 80 examples of the race-bred RPO L88 Corvette in 1968, stripping out the radio and heater in favor of aluminum heads, a solid-lifter cam, and brakes borrowed from the competition parts bin. This coupe from the Brothers Collection is one of the rarest, most authenticated survivors of that run, and V8TV’s cameras get an up-close look at exactly what made it different from every other 427 Corvette that year.
A tip in Indiana led to a Dodge Super Bee that had sat behind a closed garage door for forty years, ever since its original engine let go and the owner simply chose to store it rather than restore or part it out. Only a small fraction of 1970 Super Bees carried this six-barrel big-block setup. Here’s how rare this survivor really is.
A 1965 Plymouth Belvedere II hardtop in stock trim, running a 440 with performance work done, looks like it rolled off a period drag strip. There is a wrinkle in that description worth knowing about, because the 440 did not exist in 1965 and the 426 Hemi you could get that year was not sold for street use. Here is what Plymouth actually offered, what the Belvedere II was, and why honest big-block survivors keep climbing.
Engineering Explained gets inside Chevrolet’s Performance Build Center at the Corvette factory in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where the naturally aspirated LS7 and supercharged LT4 come together by hand. One engine chases power through raw displacement, the other through forced induction, and both end up in very different 2015 performance cars. See exactly what separates a 505-horsepower big-block philosophy from a 650-horsepower supercharged one.
Between 1959 and 1962, Oldsmobile redesigned the Rocket 88 practically every single year — new frames, new suspensions, and an American first buried inside the lineup that most shoppers walked right past. The Starfire’s console-mounted shifter changed how automatic transmissions were packaged industry-wide. Read on to find out which year brought the biggest structural change, and why the Starfire deserves more credit than it usually gets.
Between 1969 and 1974, Jaguar’s E-Type went through more change than any four-year stretch in its history — detuned engines for U.S. emissions rules, a completely new V12, and a dozen ultra-rare lightweight racers built alongside the roadgoing cars. The Series III’s 5.3-liter V12 turned the E-Type into a genuinely different machine, capable of 135 mph and a 14.82-second quarter mile. Read on to find out what separates a Series II from a Series III, and why twelve specific cars from 1963 and 1964 remain the most valuable E-Types ever built.
Oldsmobile’s 1949 Rocket 88 paired a genuinely powerful new V8 with a lightweight body, turning a staid brand into a NASCAR contender and inspiring a song some historians credit as the first rock and roll record. Across five model years the Rocket 88 gained the Hydra-Matic automatic, survived a factory fire that forced a surprise Dynaflow substitution, and picked up new options like power steering and air conditioning. Read on to find out how one engine reshaped an entire brand.
This 1970 Chevrolet Nova SS pairs a numbers-matching 350 four-barrel with a Muncie four-speed, a 12-bolt limited-slip rear end, and believed-original mileage in the mid-70,000s. It’s the kind of sleeper build that hides serious performance behind understated styling. Watch the full walkaround to see exactly what’s under the hood.
Only about 619 of them were ever built, and the racing driver they were named after had left the brand before the model year was over. The 1968 Mercury Cougar XR7-G began as a tribute to Dan Gurney’s Trans-Am program and ended as a one-year-only special with no factory racing effort left to celebrate. What buyers actually got for their money is stranger than the story behind it. Read on to find out what made this Cougar different.
Pontiac planned to build nearly 5,000 examples of the 1977 LeMans Can Am before a spoiler mold problem cut the run short at just 1,377 cars — a fraction of them fitted with a different engine entirely. RamblinAround tracks down one of the survivors, and the comments fill in details even longtime Pontiac fans admit they’d never heard before, from quarter-mile times to a rare column-shift option.
V8TV profiles the very first A12 Road Runner Plymouth ever built, the Wayward Beeper, tested by Super Stock Magazine in 1969 and driven into the 12-second zone by legendary drag racer Ronnie Sox. Its 440 Six Pack, 4-speed manual, and stripped interior were all built for one purpose, and the comments fill in the rest with period tire-pressure tricks and owners’ own Road Runner stories. Watch to see the car Chrysler itself called the fastest A12 ever built.