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A 1957 Ford Custom 300 called 700 Proof wears a moonshine-runner theme on the outside and a supercharged modern Ford V8 underneath, and the name is a dyno number, not a joke. Almost nothing about the build is what it appears to be at a glance, from the hood scoop to the wheels to the head design bolted under the blower. Read on to find out what is actually hiding under that plain-looking paint.
The Challenger SRT Demon’s launch procedure reads like a checklist from a flight manual: line lock, brake, burnout, stage, release. Behind it sits a system that builds boost before the car moves, a set of factory drag radials, and an air conditioning circuit repurposed to chill intake air. The front wheels leave the ground by nearly three feet. Read on for how Dodge got there, and what the car is like the rest of the time.
Back-to-back fuel crises in 1973 and 1979 forced Pontiac to rethink the Trans-Am from the ground up, and the result was a 1982 redesign built almost entirely around wind tunnel data — roughly 500 pounds lighter, capable of 34 mpg with the four-cylinder engine, and styled with hidden headlights and a frameless rear window. Read on to see how that fuel-crisis compromise eventually turned into the fastest production car in North America.
A nicely restored 1979 Ford F150 4×4 with the 351 V8 sits in a smaller corner of the market than most people assume, because the four-wheel-drive V8 combination was never the volume seller. This was the last year of an entire F-Series generation, riding on a front suspension design Ford had already trusted for fourteen years. Read on to find out why that suspension stuck around so long and what makes this configuration worth seeking out.
A lime-green Cougar so radically reworked that showgoers assumed it was a new model altogether — that was Mercury’s 1970 El Gato concept, unveiled at back-to-back auto shows before vanishing for good. It borrowed its fastback roofline from a Mustang, swapped its back seat for a European-style cargo shelf, and tested run-flat tire technology that failed spectacularly. Ford’s standard practice of destroying show cars means no one has documented seeing it since 1970. Here’s the story behind Mercury’s strangest concept car.
Arnold Boris has owned this Trumpet Gold 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado since 2012, and its 40,000 original miles show in every panel. What makes it special isn’t just the paint — it’s the chain-driven front-wheel-drive system Oldsmobile hadn’t attempted since the 1930s, paired with a 425 cubic-inch V8 that could reportedly out-accelerate contemporary muscle cars. See why this design still stops people in their tracks nearly six decades later.
A bone-stock, 707-horsepower Hellcat Challenger meets its match against a turbocharged Dodge Dakota sleeper build that most spectators never saw coming. Viewers are split between admiring the Hellcat’s factory muscle and cheering for the truck that “earned the Hellcat badge.” Watch to find out whether factory horsepower or a home-built turbo setup wins the quarter mile.
Two cars, three decades apart, both built around the same unusual idea: a high-performance engine wrapped in a body shaped for hauling people and cargo, not chasing lap times. One is a full-size American wagon with a glass-topped rear cabin. The other is a V12 shooting-brake from Maranello that sends power to all four wheels. Which one actually deserves the garage space?
The 1966 Chevrolet Nova SS started life as a humble compact, but buried deep in its order form was an engine option that turned it into one of the quickest bargains on the street. For 2,535 dollars, the right box checked could put a genuine performance engine under the hood of a car most people assumed was just economical transportation.
Ford built roughly 21,000 two-seat Thunderbirds for 1957, and only a couple hundred of them left the factory with the supercharged F-code 312. This one is not that car. It is a hand-built tribute running Mummert aluminum heads, an Edelbrock intake and triple carburetors under a pearl white porthole hardtop. Read on for what made the 1957 Thunderbird the best of the two-seaters and how this build chases the same idea by a different route.
That old meme comparing a subtly lowered classic to a modern stance build isn’t just a joke about changing trends — it’s a debate with real, tangled history behind it. Some trace lowered cars back to racetrack physics, others to 1940s taildragger customs, and still others to 1980s Japanese street culture. This piece untangles where stance actually came from.
This Ford Model T “Lightning Bug” was driven by “Kookie” on the late-1950s TV hit “77 Sunset Strip,” spawning countless look-alikes over the decades since. Reportedly the genuine article rather than a replica, it now wears a 454-cubic-inch big-block Chevy engine in a body built for basic 1920s transportation. Here is how that unlikely combination came together.
The 1984 Corvette was the car Chevrolet skipped an entire model year to get right, and it arrived with a chassis so stiff that magazines complained about it while recording the highest skidpad number they had ever measured on a production car. Its 205-horsepower Cross-Fire Injection V8 was the weak link in an otherwise radical package. It still outsold every other C4 model year. Read on for what made it matter.
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.
1969 marked the last year of the original Camaro body style, and Chevrolet used it to hide some of its rarest performance options in plain sight. Behind identical SS and RS badges sat everything from a mild 350 small-block to a barely-advertised 427 built for the drag strip. Only a handful of buyers knew enough to ask for the right code on the order form. These photos, courtesy of Gateway Classic Cars, capture one of the last true first-generation Camaros before the redesign.