The AMC AMX Set 106 World Speed Records in One January Week in 1968 – Then Everyone Forgot It Existed

AMC was the smallest of Detroit’s automakers, yet in 1968 it built a two-seat sports car that undercut the Corvette by over $1,000 and then quietly broke 106 world speed and endurance records with Craig Breedlove behind the wheel. Only 19,134 were ever built across three model years. Here’s the story of the AMC AMX, the muscle car most fans have never heard of.

In January 1968, a two-seat American sports car nobody talks about anymore drove onto a test track in Texas and didn’t stop for days. When the tires finally cooled, it had broken 106 separate speed and endurance records, with land-speed legend Craig Breedlove himself behind the wheel for a chunk of them. The car wasn’t a Corvette, a Cobra, or anything wearing a bowtie or a blue oval. It was an AMC AMX — a two-seater built by the smallest of Detroit’s automakers, priced more than a thousand dollars under a Corvette, and gone from showrooms in just three model years. Most muscle car fans today couldn’t pick one out of a lineup. In 1968, it was outrunning the establishment’s best.

The retrospective embedded below, produced by the documentary channel Rare Cars, walks through exactly why a car built by American Motors ever came close to touching the Corvette in the first place — from AMC’s decision to gamble its limited resources on a genuine two-seat sports car instead of another Rambler-based cruiser, to the engineering shortcuts that made the AMX possible on AMC’s shoestring budget. The video makes the case that the AMX deserves a spot in the muscle car conversation alongside far more famous names, even if most fans have never had the chance to hear one running in person.

The Two-Seater AMC Built to Steal the Corvette’s Thunder

American Motors Corporation had no business building a sports car. AMC was the perpetual underdog of the Big Four, a company that survived on economy cars like the Rambler while Ford, GM, and Chrysler fought the muscle car wars with nine-figure marketing budgets. The AMX name actually predates the production car by two years — AMC design chief Dick Teague first used “AMX,” short for American Motors eXperimental, on a pair of show cars built for the company’s 1966 Project IV concept tour, including a fiberglass two-seat AMX and a four-seat AMX II. AMC liked the reaction enough that, in February 1968, it turned the idea into a real production car: a shortened, two-seat version of the new Javelin pony car, built by chopping 12 inches out of the Javelin’s wheelbase and turning a four-seat coupe into something that could stare down a Corvette.

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It worked better than anyone expected. The 1968 AMX carried a base price around $3,245, versus roughly $4,320 for a Corvette convertible and $4,663 for the coupe — AMC undercut Chevrolet’s halo car by well over a thousand dollars while still offering a real V8 sports car experience. Buyers could option a 290 cubic-inch V8, a 343, or the range-topping 390 that made 315 horsepower, with a rare twin four-barrel 390 SS variant pushing 340 horsepower in 1969. A four-speed manual was standard, with a three-speed “Shift-Command” automatic available for buyers who wanted to leave the shifting to the transmission.

AMC built 6,725 AMXs in that debut 1968 model year, a number that climbed to 8,293 in 1969 before sliding to 4,116 in the redesigned 1970 model — the AMX’s final year as its own standalone two-seat nameplate before AMC folded the name into a Javelin trim package for 1971 through 1974. Total production across all three two-seat model years landed at 19,134 cars, a rounding error next to the hundreds of thousands of Mustangs and Camaros Ford and Chevy were moving every single year. AMC never intended the AMX to be a volume seller; it was a halo car meant to convince buyers that the company that built the Rambler could also build something that could embarrass a Corvette owner at a stoplight.

A 390 V8 With Real Muscle Car Numbers

The AMX wasn’t just a curiosity — it could genuinely run. Car and Driver clocked a 390-powered 1969 AMX at 0-60 mph in 6.6 seconds and through the quarter mile in 14.8 seconds, numbers that stood shoulder to shoulder with contemporary big-block Mustangs and Camaros, and comfortably beat plenty of cars wearing more famous badges. At just 97 inches, the AMX’s wheelbase was shorter than nearly every other muscle car on the road — shorter, in fact, than the Javelin it was based on by a full foot — which gave it a flickable, almost sports-car-like feel that its four-seat competition simply couldn’t match. Overall length ran 177 inches for the 1968-69 cars, on a curb weight of roughly 3,000 pounds.

That shorter wheelbase and the AMX’s close mechanical kinship to the Javelin also tied it into one of the most improbable success stories in American racing. AMC had no factory racing pedigree to speak of when it partnered with Roger Penske’s team and driver Mark Donohue for the 1970 Trans-Am season — and that year, Donohue delivered AMC’s first-ever Trans-Am win in a Penske-prepared Javelin, winning three races on the strength of suspension and chassis development that traced directly back to the same platform underpinning the two-seat AMX. A season later, Donohue’s seven victories carried AMC to the 1971 Trans-Am manufacturers’ championship, an outcome that would have sounded absurd just three years earlier when AMC was still known mainly for the Rambler.

The Factory Drag Racer Nobody Remembers

Road racing wasn’t the only fight AMC picked in 1969. Working with Hurst Performance Research, AMC shipped 52 body-in-white AMXs to Hurst’s Detroit facility to be converted into full Super Stock drag cars, each one 390-powered, four-speed, stripped to roughly 3,050 pounds, and finished in Frost White or a patriotic red-white-and-blue scheme with a Hurst shifter poking through the floor. The Hurst SS/AMX went on to set and reset the SS/E class speed and elapsed-time records on its way to becoming one of the most competitive door-slammers in NHRA competition, and driver Shirley Shahan won class honors in one at the car’s very first trip to the U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis — a serious result for a car built by a company most drag racers had never taken seriously. Only about 41 of the original 52 Hurst SS/AMXs are believed to survive today, and they now rank among the most valuable AMC muscle cars in existence.

106 Speed Records in One Week — Then Silence

The AMX’s single wildest moment didn’t happen on a drag strip or a road course, though — it happened on Goodyear’s test track in San Angelo, Texas, that same January of 1968. AMC brought in Craig Breedlove, the land-speed racer who’d already held the world land speed record outright in his jet-powered Spirit of America, and put him behind the wheel of specially prepared AMX and Javelin test cars alongside his wife Lee and driver Ron Dykes. Over the course of the runs, the team set 106 national and international USAC-certified speed and endurance records for cars under 488 cubic inches, and Breedlove later took an AMX to a sanctioned 189 mph at Bonneville. For a few days that winter, a car built by America’s smallest automaker was, quite literally, one of the fastest production-based cars on earth — a marketing stunt AMC couldn’t have scripted better if it tried, and one that most muscle car histories skip right past.

AMC kept pushing the AMX forward for 1970, giving it a domed Ram-Air hood as part of the optional Go Package, a redesigned front end and instrument panel, new double-wishbone front suspension, and contoured high-back bucket seats, before folding the two-seat AMX into history after just 4,116 cars that year. AMC didn’t let the AMX name disappear after that, though — it simply changed what the name meant. From 1971 through 1974, AMX became a performance trim package bolted onto the four-seat Javelin rather than its own standalone model, a shift that kept the AMX badge alive commercially even after the two-seat halo car proved too low-volume to sustain on its own. Purists still draw a hard line between the true 1968-70 two-seaters and the later Javelin-AMX cars, and that distinction is part of why the original two-seaters carry the bigger collector premium today.

Enthusiasts and automotive writers of the era couldn’t help but respect what AMC had pulled off, even knowing going in that the AMX had no real business competing with the Corvette on paper. Owners who’ve kept theirs running for decades still talk about how quick these two-seaters feel from behind the wheel, and how the sound of a 390 through side exhaust turns heads at every stoplight even now. That grassroots affection has followed the AMX into the collector market: Hagerty pegs a #2-condition (excellent) 1968-70 AMX at a median value of roughly $33,600, ranging from about $27,200 for a base 290-powered 1968 up to $52,100 for a top-spec 1970 with the 325-horsepower 390 — and AMX values overall have climbed nearly 29% since 2019 as more collectors rediscover just how much performance AMC packed into a car most people forgot existed the moment production stopped.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.