Hemmings Muscle Machines September 2017

“…we may be in the midst of another magical period, where hot cars can be had for short money… ” I’ve spent probably way too much time daydreaming about what it might have been like to be of car-buying age back when the original muscle cars were new. I’ve even devoted space to it on this page in the past, lamenting that I never got to order my own right from the factory. In variations of those fantasies, I recognized that there was a period back then that must have been magnificent, even for those who might not have been able to buy a brand-new performance ride. I figured that somewhere around the very early ’70s, the used-car market for late-model muscle must have been amazing. All those cars, just…

RED HOT AT GREEN HELL Chevrolet’s upcoming 2018 Camaro ZL1 1LE is the fastest GM street car ever to go around the Nürburgring’s 12.9-mile Nordschleife, turning a blistering 7:16.04 lap time. That makes it quicker than the Porsche 997 911 GT2 RS, the 991.2 911 GT3, the 2012 Nissan GTR, and three and a half seconds quicker than Chevy’s own C6 ZR1 around Germany’s famed “Green Hell” race track. More importantly, the ZL1 1LE was more than 13.5 seconds quicker than the 10-speed-automatic ZL1 that Chevy tested there last year. (The only American car to lap the Nordschleife faster is the 2010 Dodge Viper ACR.) How can this be? First, the ZL1 1LE is a little bit more aero-slick. It sports a new carbon-fiber rear wing, plus air deflectors and…

COUGAR II SHOW CAR OUT OF HIDING FOR 50TH ANNIVERSARY COUGAR EVENT IN DEARBORN In a rare display outside of its climate- controlled cocoon, the Cougar II show car—one of Ford’s three “X-Car” concepts built in the early Sixties—was shown on June 11, at a special Cougar 50th Anniversary event, on the grounds of Ford World Headquarters, in Dearborn, Michigan. Designed by Ford dream car stylist Eugene Bordinat, the Cougar II had proportions and cues unlike anything else from Ford, including retractable headlamps. From most angles, however, it was difficult to believe the concept wasn’t influenced at least partially by the recently introduced Corvette Sting Ray. Its featherweight form packed a punch from a 260 V-8 that Ford suggested was capable of propelling the car to 170 mph. Additional features…

GRILLE PROJECT PRINTS Nathanial Havholm californiagrilledtees.com • info@californiagrilledtees.com • $30 plus S&H We’ve all been driving and caught a glimpse of some cool car parked on a side street or tucked away behind a garage. Most times, we’re too busy to stop, but photographer and Hollywood cameraman Nathanial Havholm makes it his business to check them out. “I travel around to the different television jobs I have—sometimes four or five locations a week—with my camera, always looking for the next one,” Nathanial explains. And that’s the catch. Nathanial doesn’t set these up. He doesn’t go to car shows or make appointments with owners. His rule for his “Grille Project” photos is he must discover the cars, parked in their natural habitats. He believes their neighborhoods and owners, are…

More Chevrolets have slid and slithered through the Monte Carlo Rally than Peugeots have gone rounds in NHRA Pro Stock, but the General’s Bowtie division and European rallying don’t exactly go together like baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie. So, the Chevrolet Monte Carlo’s name must have been inspired by the swank gambling Mecca on the French Riviera — not the famous rally race. It makes sense. Chevrolet’s stylists went out of their way to distance this car from its Chevelle origins and make it a crosstown rival for the upmarket Ford Thunderbird. “Monte Carlo” was an exotic-sounding name that conjured visions of well-heeled people in formalwear playing baccarat, so it must’ve seemed like a perfect fit. But a funny thing happened on the way to…

Dodge’s Coronet was the division’s bread-and-butter midsized sedan starting in 1965, when the 330- and 440-series cars were renamed. A wrench was thrown into the works when the Charger — really a Coronet with a fastback roofline — was introduced for 1966, and for 1968 the popularity of the two-door-only Charger outshone the two-door Coronet model considerably. The Charger was flashy and pretty; the two-door Coronet stayed more closely to the workaday lines of its four-door siblings. Coronets were only a little lighter than a similarly equipped Charger (about 60 pounds) and cost only $150 less for comparable models — not a huge amount of money, even then. Coronets were meant to compete with Chevelles, and Chargers were designed to capture the emerging personal-luxury market, but the two overlapped in…