Hemmings Muscle Machines May 2019

I have a friend I’ve known ever since we spotted each other’s ratty muscle cars back in our high school parking lot, and all these years later we’re still not tired of talking about cars. We’d both been the sort of teenaged gearheads who were constantly scouting for what we considered “vintage” muscle cars. They were refugees from a time we had trouble comprehending, since we’d been too young to be aware of such things when the original muscle cars were new. By the time we were paying attention to cars as grade-school kids in the mid-’70s, factory performance was essentially dead. That meant that by the ’80s, those ’64-’72 models already seemed like classics, and the presence of any of them rarely escaped devotees like us. But many of…

IDAHO’S FIREBIRD RACEWAY LISTED ON NATIONAL REGISTER OF HISTORIC PLACES Not much has changed at Idaho’s Fire-bird Raceway since it was built in 1968. The drag strip has remained in the same family for 50 years and retains much of its original equipment as well as its hometown charm, which helped ensure the facility a spot on the National Register of Historic Places, marking the first time the list has recognized a drag strip. Founder Bill New began to scout locations for a permanent drag strip in the early ’60s. His search eventually took him to a former homestead just off Route 16 in the Treasure Valley north of Boise and Nampa. The location allowed for a north-south drag strip of a quarter-mile long with a terrain of gently sloping…

DRIVERS SERIES CORVETTE GRAND SPORT: WIN A CHAMPIONSHIP, GET A CORVETTE NAMED FOR YOU! The 2019 Corvette Drivers Series celebrates the drivers responsible for Corvette’s recent successes in international road racing. Four new special-edition Corvettes will be available as you read this. The Grand Sport-based color-and-graphics Drivers Series models feature the naturally aspirated 6.2-liter LT1 V-8 engine rated at 460 horsepower, and will be available in 1LT, 2LT, and 3LT trim. Like the race cars, they feature a dry-sump oiling system designed to support high-performance track driving. They also feature an electronic limited-slip differential, Brembo brakes, functional brake cooling ducts, widened bodywork to accommodate 19 x 10-inch front and 20 x 12-inch rear wheels wrapped with Michelin Pilot Super Sport run-flat summer-only tires, and more. The Tommy Milner Edition features…

Letter of the Month: Dad’s Pride and Joy “It was 1972. Just me and my dad, a single father and his only child. He had a lot on his plate with raising me while making $2 an hour. Still, he managed to buy a one-of-a-kind, special-order 1972 Charger Rallye. It had a 400 with a Slap-Stik-shifted 727 TorqueFlite, concealed headlights, black louvered taillights, black canopy roof, and those horizontal louver marks on the door, which were eye level to me at the time. He ordered it just the way he wanted it, and it cost about $3,500. Eight years later, he met my stepmom and took on all her baggage, which meant he then had four kids plus my little brother on the way. He did the “right thing,” and…

“ WE CAN NEITHER CONFIRM NOR DENY…” That phrase, now known as the “Glomar Response,” was part of the Central Intelligence Agency’s non-answer to inquiries about a top-secret ship called the Hughes Glomar Explorer. The Glomar’s stated purpose was to mine minerals from the bottom of the ocean. Its real purpose? To covertly extract a sunken Soviet submarine, that mysteriously plunged three miles to the ocean floor in March of 1968. The Glomar did its job bringing up a portion of the sub and the bodies of six of its crew. Or so the official story goes. Okay, but other than earning you points at the local pub’s trivia night, what could this piece of espionage history possibly have to do with a 1968 Yenko Super Camaro? Well, it’s the…

A DODGE SUPER BEE seems both an ideal and highly conspicuous machine to use in an armed robbery. After all, it is righteous quick, but also tends to stand out in the crowd—and that’s exactly what happened to Charlie Katulka’s ’69 Bee not long after he bought it new. “In 1970, it was stolen,” Charlie tells us. “My late wife, Charlotte, went to Winn-Dixie right here in Fort Lauderdale. She came out and the car wasn’t there, and there was a police officer waiting to see if she was looking for a Super Bee. They used that Super Bee to do an armed robbery right here by my house, at a Publix. “They parked it a quarter-mile away and left it running. They got in somehow through the door and…