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Four cars line up for a pink slip race in 2 Fast 2 Furious, and the build sheet behind each one is more accurate than most movie car scenes ever bother to be. Brian O’Conner’s Evo VII wears taillights from the newer Evo VIII, Roman Pearce’s Eclipse Spyder kept its stock engine under a wide-body kit, and the Camaro squaring off against a 426 Hemi Challenger is actually a period-correct Yenko replica built just for the film. See which build holds up best once the lights turn green.
Plymouth built the Duster by taking a Valiant, keeping everything forward of the cowl, and grafting on a new fastback roofline behind it. The result cost $2,172, sold over 217,000 copies in its first year, and could be had with a 340 for about four hundred dollars more. Only a fraction of buyers checked that box, which is precisely why those cars matter now. Read on for how a parts-bin economy car became a genuine muscle car bargain.
Buick spent most of the 1980s making comfortable sedans and then, in its final year, built a turbocharged six-cylinder that ran a 13.2-second quarter and beat V8s that cost far more. The 1987 Grand National and the 547 GNX units that followed it were the last of the line, assembled in part by an outside performance house, and factory rated at a number almost nobody believed. Read on for what separated a WE4 from a GNX, and what a $35 option got you.
1970 marked the final year of high-compression muscle before emissions regulations and an unleaded fuel mandate changed everything — and this breakdown argues the real winner of that last great year came from an unexpected place. The Buick GS 455 Stage 1 quietly out-torqued nearly every rival on the market, backed up by a factory performance package most people never associated with Buick. One recent owner’s comment about a first ride with his daughter says it all.
The 1969 Pontiac GTO everyone remembers wears Judge decals and a rear spoiler. The one enthusiasts quietly prefer wears neither. A 400-cubic-inch four-barrel, a close-ratio four-speed, and 445 lb-ft arriving at just 3,000 rpm made the undecorated GTO the better street car by almost every measure that matters. Here is why the plain one keeps winning the argument.
The fastest engine Ford offered in the 1966 Mustang had no badge, no brochure spread, and no salesman pushing it. It hid behind a single letter in the vehicle identification number, and fewer than one percent of that year’s buyers ever checked the box. What that letter bought you was a solid-lifter V8 built to rev like a race engine, and the details that give it away are still the first thing collectors look for.
Chevrolet spent years developing the Camaro under a code name that had nothing to do with cats and everything to do with secrecy, then refused to explain what the production name actually meant. The answer a company spokesman finally gave the press has been quoted ever since. Across thirty-five years and four generations the car went from a 427 big block to a four-cylinder to an all-aluminum 305-horsepower LS1. Read on for how it got there.
A numbers-matching Hemi ‘Cuda and a modern supercharged Hellcat don’t usually end up in the same driveway, let alone the same video — but that’s exactly what happens here, thanks to a Mopar owner named Daryl who trusted a stranger with his classic muscle car for an afternoon. What starts as an old-school-versus-new-school comparison turns into something more personal about who these cars actually belong to. The horsepower gap is real, but it’s not the whole story.
Flowmaster’s own breakdown of its muffler lineup tackles a question that trips up nearly every muscle car owner shopping for an exhaust upgrade: which series actually fits your car? With over a dozen options ranging from the raw, track-ready 10 Series to the daily-driver-friendly 50 Series, picking based on name recognition alone is a common and costly mistake. This video walks through exactly what separates each series — and why drone matters more than volume.
This 1963 Mercury Comet was bought new at a Tyler, Texas dealership in May 1963 and driven by the same owner into her nineties, accumulating just 45,000 miles along the way. What makes it genuinely uncommon is not the mileage but the order sheet: a base sedan optioned with both the 260 V8 and air conditioning, a combination almost nobody chose. Read on to find out why that pairing was so rare and what it means today.
This show-quality 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air has covered just 42 miles since its restoration, and almost nothing under the skin is what General Motors installed. A 1969 Corvette 350 replaced the original small block, an overdrive automatic sits where a Powerglide once did, and the car now stops on power front discs it never had. The result is a Tri-Five that looks period-correct and drives like it was built this decade. Read on to find out what changed and why it matters.
Chevrolet had an El Camino prototype drawn up in 1952 and then let it sit untouched for seven years. What finally pushed it into production was watching Ford get rewarded for the same idea. The car that resulted wore Bel Air trim over a Biscayne interior, carried a corrugated steel bed floor, and in its hottest form ran a 14-second quarter with a tri-carb 348 under the hood. Two model years later it was gone. Read on to find out what killed it.
Chevrolet built the Chevy II because the Corvair could not beat the Ford Falcon, and it built it fast — a full range of five body styles and four trim levels, on a wheelbase deliberately half an inch longer than the Falcon’s. Then drag racers noticed how little it weighed, and a dealer-installed V8 changed the plot entirely. Read on to find out how a compact economy car ended up in the same conversation as the GTO.
Plymouth built the Road Runner on a contrarian idea: strip out the luxury everyone else was adding, keep the price low, and let an enormous engine do the talking. Sales projections were in the low thousands. It sold forty-four thousand in its first year. Read on for the cartoon licensing deal, the horn that cost ten thousand dollars to develop, and the mid-year option package that turned a budget muscle car into a Hemi hunter.
By 1980 emissions rules had taken most of the horsepower out of Detroit, and Pontiac needed its flagship to look fast whether or not it actually was. The answer was a turbocharger bolted onto a 301 small-block and the largest hood decal General Motors ever approved. Mike Musto put one to the test. Read on to find out whether the numbers backed up the theater.