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Helsinki holds its own muscle car cruising night every month from April through October, and the July 2012 edition proves American iron has fans far outside the United States. A matte black 663-horsepower Shelby GT500 convertible shares the lot with a Bullitt tribute Mustang, a fleet of Mopar muscle, and even a 1930s Auburn Speedster. It is proof that horsepower obsession does not stop at the American border. See which car steals the show.
1970 was the year Ford finally let the Torino nameplate flex real muscle. Motor Trend had just named it Car of the Year, and buyers could order a Torino Cobra with a Ram Air 429 and a Hurst-shifted four-speed instead of the usual family-hauler running gear. Only 7,675 took the offer. Here is what separated a Cobra Jet from a Super Cobra Jet, and why clean original interiors like this one are harder to find than the engines.
Redline Reviews takes an unusually honest look at a 2018 Corvette Grand Sport, calling out a cabin rattle most reviewers would gloss over while still framing it as the best-handling C7 built to date. A folding infotainment screen, real automatic-transmission feedback, and a subtle silver paint job round out a walkaround that’s aged better than most Corvette content from the same era.
Before Mopar’s High-Impact color names became legend, a handful of green paint codes only existed for a single model year, vivid enough to earn nicknames like Sublime and Sassy Grass. This piece traces where those shades came from, why some vanished within twelve months, and how a traffic-light-inspired green ended up on some of the boldest muscle cars of 1969 and 1970.
This 1965 Mercury Comet wears the sponsor decals and drag-strip stance of a car built to race — and it’s channeling a genuinely wild piece of history. Roughly two dozen factory Comet Cyclones once terrorized NHRA’s A/FX class with dual-quad 427s under the hood, arguably helping invent the Funny Car along the way.
Nick’s Garage turned Christmas week into a holiday tradition built entirely around horsepower, pouring shots of Ouzo before strapping a freshly built Mopar X-block to the dyno. Viewers immediately recognized the engine as Chrysler’s high-performance 340, a small block that punched above its displacement against the 350s and 302s of its era. Between the shop-family comment section and the raw, door-open exhaust note, this is less a spec-sheet video than a shop full of engine builders sharing their holiday. Watch to see what the pull actually makes.
This 1970 Mercury Cyclone shares its Fairlane-based platform and optional 429 big-block with the far more famous Ford Torino parked next to it at every car show, yet Mercury’s own corporate sibling keeps stealing the spotlight it arguably deserves to share. With up to 375 horsepower available in Super Cobra Jet trim and genuine NASCAR-era racing pedigree behind the name, it’s an underdog collectors are finally starting to notice. Read on to find out why.
Every muscle car built after 1964 owes something to three Pontiac engineers who found a loophole in GM’s own rulebook. By making a big-block an option package instead of a standalone model, John DeLorean’s team put a 389 into a mid-size LeMans without technically breaking corporate policy. Pontiac’s sales team capped production at 5,000 units and were wrong by a factor of six. Read on for how a paperwork trick invented an entire category of American car.
By 1973, most of Plymouth’s real performance had already been regulated away — except for one engine nobody expected much from. Bud Lindemann puts this Cuda 340 through a full road test, and the stopwatch tells a story that surprised buyers who’d already written off the smog era. Watch to see exactly how quick a detuned Mopar could still be.
A black 1973 Trans Am with its shaker hood scoop open looks the part from any angle — but underneath could be one of two completely different engines, separated by a rarity gap of roughly nineteen to one. Pontiac’s Special Projects group built the SD-455 as a genuine heavy-duty answer to tightening emissions rules, and only 252 Trans Ams ever got it. Read on to find out what separated Pontiac’s last real muscle car engine from the ordinary 455.
Coy Harvey opened a garage door in Lubbock, Texas expecting ordinary clutter and found a 1966 Shelby GT350 buried underneath years of garden tools and Christmas decorations. It’s not just any GT350 — it’s a rare “carry-over” example, built during the transition between the 1965 and 1966 model years using earlier-spec components. Harvey’s own background restoring classic Mustangs meant he knew exactly what he’d found the moment he saw it.
Clive Sutton already had a reputation for tuning Mustangs to 700bhp, then his shop decided to go further. The CS800 squeezes as much as 825bhp and 640 lb-ft out of the Mustang’s 5.0-litre V8 using a Stage 2 Whipple supercharger, backing the numbers with a full carbon-fibre body kit and a bespoke interior. Here’s what it takes to build Britain’s answer to the American muscle car.
This 1965 Chevy Nova SS wears a body Chevrolet never paired with a 406 cubic-inch V8, a Ford 9-inch rear end, or rack-and-pinion steering — all changes bolted on by a builder chasing quarter-mile performance over factory correctness. Sub-frame connectors, a trunk-mounted battery, and Mickey Thompson drag radials all point toward a car built to launch hard, not just look sharp at a cruise-in. RamblinAround walked through the full build with photos and receipts in hand at Fast Lane Classic Cars. Watch to see how far off the factory blueprint a serious Nova build can go.
This mystery muscle car is a Mercury Montego, a nameplate most fans forget even competed in the muscle car wars. Built on the same platform as the Ford Torino but wearing Mercury’s own badging, the Montego got a genuine performance package in 1972 with the potent 429 Cobra Jet V8 as its top engine option. Mercury sold the GT package for only two years and roughly 10,000 units, making surviving examples a genuinely rare find.
Everyone knows the Corvette skipped a model year and the Daytona’s wing was built for speed — but fewer people know that wing height was also a trunk-lid compromise, or that a handful of Dodge dealers once built the only production car to wear factory Cragar wheels. This rundown digs past the four facts every muscle car list repeats to the trivia that actually surprises collectors. Read on to find out which 1970 Super Bee variant was rarer than the Six Pack.