Hemmings Muscle Machines April 2019

When we set out to start planning the articles for this month’s Special Section on Enjoying Your Collector Car, there was some confusion among the staff, most of which could be summed up by the question I kept hearing: “What does that mean?” We’d conceived of the section’s title nearly a year prior to embarking on executing its content, so it was understandable that some of the initial discussions had faded from memory. But I’d been thinking about this sort of thing for some time. I took it as a call to actually use our old cars more, and in new ways, rather than what has become the norm for so many of us: the regular ride to the local cruise-in and perhaps an occasional jaunt to a car show…

INDIANAPOLIS MOTOR SPEEDWAY HALL OF FAME ANNOUNCES 2019 NOMINEES Each year, voting members of the IMS Hall of Fame cut a list of four candidates down to two inductees, to be announced on March 20. For 2019, candidates are Wally Dallenbach Sr., Dale Earnhardt Sr. (picture left), Dale Jarrett (picture right), and Jacques Villeneuve. Earnhardt competed in seven Brickyard 400s, including the first in ’94. He won in ’95, one of his 76 NASCAR Cup wins over a 25-plus-year career. He was series champion seven times (tying Richard Petty and Jimmie Johnson) before his death in a 2001 Daytona 500 crash. Before Dallenbach served as competition director and chief steward of CART, he earned his stripes as a racer. Dallenbach began his pro career in stock cars, but soon switched…

GT500: 700+ HORSEPOWER, 0-60 MID-3S, COMING FALL 2019 The second-worst-kept secret in Detroit, the new Ford Mustang Shelby GT500, has officially been announced at the North American International Auto Show. At the moment, Ford is quoting “700-plus” horsepower from its supercharged 5.2-liter all-aluminum DOHC V-8. The company is also promising mid-3-second 0-60-mph times and “sub-11-second quarter-mile” timeslips for the quickest acceleration ever in a road-going Mustang. An 11-quart aluminum oil pan will feature active baffles for extreme performance maneuvers. No stick transmission will be available: GT500’s only transmission is a new seven-speed TREMEC dual-clutch transmission that can go fully automatic, semi-automatic with paddle shifters, or fully manual with paddle shifters. The GT500’s 5.2-liter version of the DOHC Coyote V-8 adds a Roots-type Eaton supercharger that also allows for a bigger…

Letter of the Month: Goat Rescue “It’s funny how things end up sometimes. This story starts with a car accident and ends up with a 1968 GTO convertible saved from the scrapyard. In the late 1970s in New York, you could get muscle cars for next to nothing. Sometimes my friend Billy T. and I would see one without license plates in someone’s yard, and when we would inquire about the car the owner would be glad to get rid of it. One day, as I was heading home in my 1967 Chevelle Malibu, I was struck in the side and technically the car was totaled. I found a green 1968 Pontiac Le Mans hardtop with a blown engine for 50 bucks. My friend John R. had just hit a…

THE NEXT TIME SOMEONE SAYS, “You can’t go home again,” make sure you properly tell them off. And by properly tell them off, may we suggest not a one-fingered salute, but a smoking, screeching burnout that leaves twin strips of rubber bits all over their driveway? Before Don Miller enjoyed an extraordinarily successful career as the head of Penske Racing — yes, that Penske Racing — he was a racer and hot-rodder in his own right, though his preferred form of racing didn’t involve any turning whatsoever. “I grew up in Chicago and I was always around cars,” Don recalls. “My dad started me off real early, building a ’36 Ford roadster. It kind of evolved from there. And then I prepared my first race car, which was a Model…

This Chevy is kind of like a big trip to the past. I always liked the original car because it was fast and all of that, and we were really competitive, but it was like owning a boat, because every time you started the engine, you had to put more money in it. It’s not a boat anymore. I don’t want it to be a boat. I want it to be a fun thing to do on a weekend that keeps your adrenaline pumping. I just want the thing to be reliable and something you don’t have to spend all week working on just to run it on Sunday. We went to a couple of the nostalgia races. It will run 11.50, 11.60 pretty regularly in the 120s. That’s pretty…