Posts Tagged: Year Model

Most pony car underdogs stay underdogs – but this one didn’t. AMC handed its ailing Trans-Am program to Roger Penske and driver Mark Donohue, and within a season they’d turned the Javelin into a genuine giant-killer, taking the fight straight to Ford and Chevrolet on their own turf. By 1971 Donohue was winning nearly every race he entered, and AMC walked away with a manufacturer’s championship nobody saw coming. Here’s how a car built on a shoestring became one of Trans-Am’s most dominant machines.

Ford didn’t build the Torino Talladega to sell to the public — they built it because NASCAR’s rulebook demanded a minimum production run before the aerodynamic bodywork could race. About 750 were made, every one running the same 428 Cobra Jet, C6 automatic, and stretched nose. On track, it paid off with 29 NASCAR wins across two seasons.

For most of the 1950s, one horsepower per cubic inch was the number Detroit chased and rarely caught. Chevrolet got there in 1957 with a 283 cubic-inch small block, Rochester mechanical fuel injection, and a solid-lifter camshaft, wrapped in a Bel Air Sport Coupe most buyers ordered for the two-tone paint. Roughly 1,530 Chevrolets left the factory that year with the option. Read on to find out why almost nobody checked the box.

This 1966 Chevrolet Bel Air looks like an anonymous fleet special, but buyers could order it with the RPO L35 396 Turbo-Jet V8 — rated 325 horsepower and 410 lb-ft of torque — the same engine family turning heads in the Impala SS and Corvette that year. Skip the badges and bright trim, and a Bel Air with a 396 and four-speed became one of the fastest sleepers on the street. Read on to find out why so few dealers ever built one this way.

Guessing the year on a prewar Oldsmobile convertible is trickier than it looks: the drop-top body and the straight-eight engine collectors often look for did not actually arrive on the same model in the same year. Here is how to tell a real Series 60 from the bigger, straight-eight-powered senior cars, and why so few of these soft tops survived to be argued over today.

This black widebody coupe, with its flared fenders and hood vents, was posted purely as a guessing game: name the year and model, then rate it. Widebody and flare kits like this one trace back to the exotic-inspired custom builds of the late 1970s and ’80s, when builders reshaped stock bodies to look more aggressive and race-ready. Take your best guess before scrolling further to see how close you got.

A close crop of chrome grille and quad headlights is all this guessing game gives away, and that’s plenty to start an argument among Thunderbird fans. Ford reinvented the ‘Bird’s face almost every generation between 1955 and the early 1970s, from sports car to four-seat luxury cruiser. Can you place the exact year from the grille alone?