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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.
Plymouth handed 1971 Barracuda buyers 21 colors to choose from, including six eye-searing High Impact shades built to be seen from across a parking lot. Underneath that bold paint sat styling details found on no other model year, and an engine lineup topped by a Hemi so rare that only seven convertibles left the factory. Explore what makes this one-year-only ‘Cuda so distinctive.
Long before the muscle car era officially kicked off, Chevrolet was already quietly building one of its forerunners: the 1962 Impala SS 409. Buried under that full-size, family-friendly body was a 409 cubic-inch V8 available in a version that hit exactly 409 horsepower, a one-horsepower-per-cubic-inch flex Chevrolet’s engineers clearly built on purpose. It’s the car a Beach Boys song made famous before most people ever got to drive one.
Ringbrothers built their 1969 Camaro ‘G-Code’ with a supercharged 416 cubic inch V8 making a claimed 1,000 horsepower, Detroit Speed suspension, one-off IROC-inspired wheels, and an interior one commenter compared to a Pagani. TheSmokingTire took it out to find out if a SEMA showstopper like this could actually be driven — and the reaction in the comments is split down the middle. Watch to see which side you land on.
This Chevy Nova wagon predates the car’s reputation as one of the era’s sneakiest muscle cars, wagon bodies disappeared from the lineup right as the Nova SS was becoming a serious performer. Here’s how a compact family hauler and a legendary muscle car ended up sharing the same nameplate, and why genuine Nova wagons are rarer today than the SS models everyone remembers.
A dusty photo of a gold fastback with hidden headlights is stirring debate among readers trying to nail the exact year and model. The shape hints at Dodge’s most iconic body style of the muscle car era, but the details that separate one model year from the next are surprisingly easy to miss. See if your eye is as sharp as you think.
Plymouth only offered this exact combination for a few months before moving on, which is precisely why the A12 Road Runner remains one of the most talked-about mid-year muscle cars ever built. Wearing Vitamin C Orange paint straight from The Brothers Collection, this particular 440 Six Barrel car represents a stopgap Chrysler engineered on the fly to answer a very specific rival. Watch to find out what problem this car was actually built to solve.
A 1967 Barracuda wearing ‘AAR’ badging is borrowing a name that wouldn’t exist as a real Plymouth package for three more years. That contradiction is exactly what makes this custom build interesting – a first-year redesigned Barracuda dressed up as a legend that hadn’t been built yet. Here’s what the real 1967 Barracuda offered from the factory, and where the AAR name actually came from.