They Pulled a 707-HP Hellcat V8 Out of a Running Challenger — Then Dropped It Into an El Camino on Gold Wire Wheels

CBoysTV took the supercharged 6.2-liter Hemi out of their own Challenger Hellcat and built it into a last-generation Chevy El Camino — 707 horsepower in a car whose factory V8 made around 150. Three million people have now watched it drift, smoke tires, and line up against real muscle cars. The most repeated comment under the video: it looks like Chevrolet built it that way.

Most engine swaps start with a junkyard core and a lot of optimism. This one started by tearing apart a perfectly good Dodge Challenger Hellcat so its supercharged 6.2-liter Hemi could go somewhere considerably stranger. The destination was a red Chevrolet El Camino riding on gold wire wheels — a car that left the factory with a small-block making roughly a fifth of that power, and that Chevrolet stopped building entirely in 1987. CBoysTV pulled it off anyway, and more than three million people have now watched the result get pointed at a drag strip. The swap itself is impressive. What the thing does afterward is the part nobody can stop talking about.

The Build That Began by Gutting a Perfectly Good Hellcat

The premise takes one sentence to explain and forty-six minutes to actually watch: pull the 707-horsepower supercharged V8 out of the crew’s own Dodge Challenger Hellcat, and put it into Evan’s El Camino. That engine is the 6.2-liter supercharged Hemi that Dodge rated at 707 horsepower and 650 lb-ft of torque when the Challenger SRT Hellcat landed for 2015 — the number that turned a mid-size coupe into the loudest headline in American performance for most of a decade. Moving it into a General Motors chassis is not a weekend job. Mounts, driveline, fuel delivery, cooling, and a wiring harness that was never designed to speak Chevrolet all have to be solved before the key turns once.

What surprised viewers most was not the horsepower figure. It was the finish. The comment that keeps resurfacing under the video is that the crew “made it look factory,” and that is a fair read of the car. There is no exposed loom draped over the fenders, no hacked-up sheet metal, no visible evidence that a Mopar engine is living under a Chevrolet hood. It looks like something GM might have built in an alternate universe where the SS badge meant seven hundred horsepower instead of a stripe package.

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Then they went out and abused it. The back half of the video is drifting, burnouts, and drag racing against other muscle cars, which is the honest test of any fresh swap — a build either survives that or it doesn’t. The crew has built its channel on exactly this kind of escalation from a shop in Audubon, Minnesota, and the El Camino gets treated like every other project they’ve put on camera: hard, immediately, and in front of an audience.

Chevrolet Spent 25 Years Building the Car Nobody Could Categorize

The El Camino has always been an argument with wheels. Chevrolet introduced it for 1959 as an answer to Ford’s Ranchero, killed it after two model years, then brought it back for 1964 on the Chevelle platform — which is where the idea finally made sense. If the Chevelle was the muscle car, the El Camino was the muscle car you could throw a spare transmission into. Production ran all the way through 1987, covering that brief first act, a long Chevelle-based middle stretch, and a final run from 1978 to 1987 on GM’s G-body architecture.

At its peak the thing was genuinely quick. For 1970, buyers could order an El Camino SS with the LS6 454, gross-rated at 450 horsepower and 500 lb-ft of torque — the same headline engine that made the 1970 Chevelle SS an icon. Only a few hundred El Caminos were built with it, which is why a documented LS6 car is a six-figure conversation today rather than a weekend project. That is the version most people picture the moment somebody says “El Camino SS.”

The car in this video is emphatically not that car. It’s from the last generation, the 1978–1987 G-body era, by which point the El Camino’s V8 menu had shrunk to a 305 making somewhere around 150 horsepower in standard tune — a figure that would have embarrassed the 1970 model. That is precisely what makes these such good swap candidates. They’re cheap, they’re everywhere, the aftermarket knows the G-body chassis cold, and nobody is going to accuse you of butchering a numbers-matching survivor. It’s the same math that keeps the second-generation Camaro in reach of normal budgets; we broke down what one of those actually costs to revive in this look at a $3,800 Camaro project.

Why 707 Horsepower in an El Camino Hits Different

A Challenger making 707 horsepower is expected. That was the product, straight off the showroom floor. Putting the identical engine into a forty-year-old Chevy that is half car and half pickup is a joke with a punchline you can feel through the floorpan, and that’s a large part of why the video cleared three million views inside a couple of months. It sits directly on top of two arguments muscle car people never get tired of having: whether dropping a Mopar engine into a Chevrolet is heresy or genius, and whether the El Camino was ever really a muscle car to begin with.

It also arrives at a moment when the Hellcat engine has quietly become a swap staple rather than a showroom brag. Dodge ended Challenger production in December 2023, and the current Charger’s headline gas engine is the twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter Hurricane inline-six, which makes 550 horsepower and 531 lb-ft in Scat Pack trim. The supercharged 6.2 is increasingly something builders source from a wrecked donor rather than order new — and once an engine becomes a donor engine, it starts showing up in places its engineers never imagined. An El Camino on wire wheels is just the funniest one yet.

The Detail Viewers Keep Arguing About

If there’s one consistent note in the comments, it isn’t about the engine at all — it’s the wheels. The gold wires look spectacular sitting still, and they are almost exactly the wrong tool for putting 707 horsepower to the pavement. “The El Camino on normal wheels and good tyres would be amazing,” one viewer wrote, and a lot of people agreed. That tension is the whole charm of the build: it’s a show car stance bolted to a genuinely violent drivetrain, and the crew seems perfectly aware of the contradiction. Whether they fix it or lean into it is probably the next video.

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