Hemmings Muscle Machines May 2021

A few years before the muscle car era officially kicked off, the Big Three auto manufacturers in Detroit were already competing in the horsepower wars. The full-size cars of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s brought along large-displacement engines that rocked the automotive world with stout compression ratios, solid-lift camshafts and multiple carburetors. The example shown here is a 1962 Chevrolet Bel Air, which is actually one of Chevy’s lower trim models, compared to the highly-optioned Impala. These stripped-down cars were often equipped with six-cylinder engines, but a select few left the factory with Chevrolet’s top-performing engine, the illustrious 409. This beautifully restored 1962 Bel Air bubbletop features a set of 14-inch OE steel wheels, which are painted body color and equipped with original dog dish caps. The tires come…

“All of these elements came together to yield something really interesting…” I’ve been spending some of my winter evenings watching online videos of people working on their car projects, and lately I seem to have homed in on a particular trend with some of these builds: creating functional cars from hulks that were well on their way to being scrap. On the surface, that might sound like the typical muscle car restoration story — battered and weathered specimen gets renewed into a shiny example of its former self. But these are different. These efforts tend to begin with subjects normally dismissed as the ones that are “too far gone,” and often wind up with something that deviates substantially from the form it held back when it rolled off an assembly…

MUSCLE CARS OF 1970 FEATURED AT AMELIA ISLAND By May, the Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance is usually in our rearview mirrors, but in 2021 COVID-19 has shifted the event’s dates to May 20-23, in an effort to ensure that a higher percentage of the population has access to the vaccine. Of particular interest to muscle car fans is one of this year’s featured classes, “Muscle Cars of 1970.” As the Sixties shifted into the Seventies, muscle car sales were thriving. Buyers could choose from a staggering variety of options across numerous price points, and, while bright colors and loud graphics were commonplace, it was still performance that ruled the category. Few could have envisioned the segment’s decline in just three more years. It wasn’t just the blue-collar manufacturers who sought…

SRT SUBSUMED BY STELLANTIS FORMER FCA’S HIGH-PERFORMANCE ENGINEERS HAVE BEEN REASSIGNED THROUGHOUT THE NEWLY FORMED COMPANY Chrysler’s SRT Group has its bones in the team that produced the Dodge Viper concept car back in the late ’80s; later, it was blended with the Prowler team to create Special Vehicle Engineering (SVE). Once Mercedes-Benz came in during the “merger of equals,” around the start of the millennium, SVE was renamed Performance Vehicle Operations (PVO), which was designed to do for Chrysler Corporation’s vehicles what AMG had done for Mercedes-Benz. By 2004, PVO was renamed SRT (short for Street & Racing Technology), a name that has stuck around. SRT briefly became its own (short-lived) marque in 2012; by 2014, SRT was absorbed back into Dodge. It’s had a hand in some of…

Letter of the Month: Our Mustang “I have been a subscriber to HMM for quite a few years now. I am a die-hard Ford nut, but appreciate all classic muscle. My dad (Joseph Parkos) loved to take me to cruise nights when I started to show interest in cars. We would do the “zombie” walk around the parked cars, admiring all the makes and models. I loved to hear about the cars he owned back in the day. He had so many cool rides, but my favorite was his ’67 Mustang convertible. Eventually, I would buy my own ’68 Mustang convertible. This story, however, is about the ’69 Mustang GT SportsRoof we owned together. It was supposed to be a father/daughter project, but it had spent too much time under…

FERRARI HAS A WORD FOR IT: MODIFICATA. Basically, it’s a car that’s been tweaked for additional performance, often to the detriment of refinement and streetability in exchange for some benefit on the track. More power, grippier but less-forgiving suspension, a roll cage for both stiffness and safety, some updated technology, and voila! A few Ferraris have had the big M thrown into their alphanumeric nomenclature over the years, and they’ve always been degrees hairier than the standard-issue versions. But this isn’t a Ferrari. It’s a Mustang — built by Ford, a company that had the temerity to take on Ferrari at its own game on-track and win. And almost before you clamp eyes on the Shelby-ized body, before you can soak in the mildest of drops atop 17-inch rubber with…