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Dodge arrived at the pony car party six years late and compensated by offering more engines than anyone else, from a 383 all the way to the 426 Hemi. The Challenger R/T was the sharp end of that lineup, and the cars that stayed with one family instead of getting flipped or raced into the ground are now the ones collectors chase hardest. Read on for what made the first-generation car special.
A wildly painted cab-style classic at a car show has readers debating its exact year, make, and model, and the clues are easy to miss if you do not know what to look for. This body style was common across several trim levels in the mid-1950s, which is exactly why fleet buyers loved it. See if you can spot the details that give this one away.
This full-size Mopar spent the late 1960s as the most common sight in American police fleets, chosen by departments from coast to coast over anything Ford or GM offered. Under the skin sat heavy-duty everything: reinforced suspension, semi-metallic brakes, and an electrical system built to run radios and light bars all shift long. Buyers could option as little as a 230-horsepower 318 or as much as a 375-horsepower 440 wedge. See if you can identify the year, make, and model wearing the badge.
These three overlooked muscle cars all earned obscurity in different ways, from a Hemi Dart built purely for the drag strip to a Rebel Machine unveiled at NHRA’s biggest stage. The Hemi Dart’s 426 engine ran quarter-mile times in the nine-second range not long after leaving the factory, numbers that still hold up decades later. AMC’s Machine countered with a standard 340-horsepower V8 built for straight-line bragging rights of its own. Here’s what made each of these forgotten muscle cars worth a second look.
Pontiac named this GTO trim after a running gag from Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, then built it tough enough to make the joke stick. The Judge launched in January 1969 as a direct answer to the Plymouth Road Runner, standard with a 366-horsepower Ram Air III V8 and an optional Ram Air IV that pushed things further. Only 6,833 Judges were built that year, and the rarest Ram Air IV versions numbered under 300. Here’s how to tell which engine — and which era of Pontiac’s horsepower war — this particular Judge represents.
American muscle cars have found an unlikely second home in Japan, thanks largely to one hot rodder’s decades-long effort to bring the culture overseas. The Mooneyes shows in Tokyo and Yokohama now draw tens of thousands of fans to see hundreds of vehicles and motorcycles each year. Wandering through the crowd, though, this video finds something that has nothing to do with Detroit at all. Here’s the story behind the show, and the oddity that stole the spotlight.
Royce Peterson wired the full asking price for a rare 1968 Cobra Jet Cougar XR7 after just thirty minutes of thought, convinced the car might be connected to a personal encounter with drag racing legend Don ‘Dyno Don’ Nicholson fourteen years earlier. Only 10 to 12 Cobra Jet Cougars from that model year are known to exist. Read on for how a chance trackside conversation became a decade-spanning provenance mystery.
Two red muscle cars, one racetrack, and zero information to go on, just the shapes to judge them by. This kind of side-by-side forces you to rely on stance, proportions, and gut instinct instead of spec sheets. It’s the purest version of the ‘which one would you drive’ debate that muscle car fans have been having for decades. Pick a side and see if you can defend it.
A 1960 Corvette built as a tribute to a father’s military aviation career has to walk a narrow line, because too few details and the concept misses while too many turn it into a costume. Underneath the aviation theme sits a model year most casual fans skip right past, one where Chevrolet quietly built a record number of cars and started taking handling as seriously as horsepower. Read on for what makes 1960 the right starting point.
The Ford Galaxie’s first three model years hid a genuine engineering experiment behind conventional full-size styling — a batch of roughly 200 lightweight race-only cars built to shed weight nobody expected Ford to bother losing. Add a one-year-only retractable hardtop and a short-lived Starliner body style, and the 1959-1961 Galaxie turns out to be far more interesting than its reputation as just a big sedan suggests. Read on for what made these years different.
This convertible’s color and stripe combination are the easy part of the guessing game – the real question is what’s under the hood. If it’s the LS6, you’re looking at one of just 4,475 ever built, an engine strong enough to beat a Road Runner 440 Six Pack and a Torino Cobra 429 in period Motor Trend testing.
The Dodge Challenger SRT Demon was engineered to lift its front wheels off the line from the factory, with 840 horsepower and a 9.65 second quarter mile. So when a prototype turned up at a racing event with an audible engine knock, the question everyone had been quietly asking finally surfaced. Read on for what detonation actually does to a supercharged engine, and why a prototype failure is not the same as a design flaw.
Two enormous Corvette stories broke at nearly the same moment: credible spy footage of a mid-engine car running with minimal camouflage, and reports that the final front-engine ZR1 was close to being finalized. The Corvette community had to decide which one to argue about first. Read on to find out how both stories eventually resolved, and which side of the argument the results favored.
This 1958 Pontiac Chieftain rolled off the line during the final season of a nameplate Pontiac had built since 1949, one year before an all-new Catalina made it obsolete. Under its restyled, honeycomb-grille body sat an air suspension and tri-power V8 borrowed from Pontiac’s priciest engineering ideas. Only a few thousand were built this way. Here’s what made the last Chieftain worth a second look.
This orange Firebird’s shovel-nose front end and round headlights only appeared on Pontiac’s build sheets for a single model year. It’s also tied to the final year of the brand’s biggest V8, right before emissions rules reshaped what muscle meant. Take your guess before the reveal — the details narrow it down more than you’d expect.