Hemmings Muscle Machines April 2022

“The aura surrounding Chevy’s two-seater was powerful stuff…” I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know what a Corvette was. I’ve been consumed with cars seemingly since birth, but I don’t know exactly when I was first made aware of the Corvette. Maybe that’s a comment on the car’s impact on American life by the 1970s: Even as a very young child, I knew just what America’s sports car was, I knew that it was made of fiberglass, and I knew they were supposed to be fast. Sadly, right around the time I was really getting to know something about cars, the Corvette was losing the power that had earned it a reputation as one of the quickest vehicles on the road. I was familiar with…

DRIVEN: 2022 CADILLAC CT4-V BLACKWING COME FOR THE POWER; STAY FOR THE CHASSIS Two decades ago, the idea of a Cadillac appearing in HMM made no sense; today, Cadillac builds a pair of sedans called Blackwing that are the talk of the sport-sedan world. Seen here is the CT4-V Blackwing, an unwieldy name to read and type. Beneath the Blackwing’s hood is a twin-turbo, 3.6-liter direct-injection V-6. All 472 horsepower are easily accessible; you feel like you could touch 500 horsepower if you were allowed to rev beyond the 6,500-rpm redline. Yet at idle, you’d barely know it was running, such is its smoothness. A Tremec six-speed stick is standard issue here. It not only suggests serious intent — even if it’s usually a tick slower than the optional 10-speed…

FLIP-TOP CYCLONE I have a question about your January issue and the fantastic story on the Mercury Cyclone. On the third page of the story, in the second photo below the big shot of the CJ429 engine, it appears the carriage with the running lights and the “target” grille is flipped backwards... why? What are we looking at? I don’t see anything about it in the photo caption. Michael Meyers Dana Point, California What you’re seeing there is indeed the center grille section flipped open. The Mercurys with that grille setup have a hinged center section that is made to swing up and back, presumably to provide easy access to… something. The running lamp bulbs? The headlamp door actuators? We weren’t exactly sure. West Coast Editor Jeff Koch once owned…

“Even when it comes to muscle cars, sometimes the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Back in 1986, when I was in high school, I was fortunate enough to own a 1978 Pontiac Trans Am with the W72 option. The car ran great, but I wound up selling it upon graduation to get into a Fox-body Mercury Capri 5.0. My son, Evan, has a love of rear-drive cars and he was lucky enough to purchase a 1994 Pontiac Trans Am 25th Anniversary model when he was a junior in high school in January 2020. Evan was a student at Westfield Technical Academy at the time, in the Aviation Maintenance shop. At home, he and I fixed the flip-up headlights, installed a new battery, hatch shocks, alternator, spark plugs, and…

THE ROAR OF HEAVY-BREATHING V-8 ENGINES and screaming tires searching for traction broke central Michigan’s rural silence like a fast-moving summer thunderstorm. Billowing clouds of tire smoke cast temporary shadows, carried east by prevailing winds. For a moment, the cacophony settled before the V-8s awoke again with an unbridled fury of speed. Mere seconds of peace returned, only to have the cycle repeat. And repeat. And repeat yet again. So much for a quiet Friday morning on the farm fields surrounding a quarter-mile stretch of pavement known as Mid-Michigan Motorplex. Then again, it was hardly a surprise to locals, who have become used to the annual September gathering of the Pure Stock Muscle Car Drags faithful at the storied Stanton facility. It’s been happening for nearly three decades. And while…

WHEN Victorian-era British mathematician John Venn developed his eponymous diagrams, consisting of “inclusive and exclusive circles… so obviously representative of the way in which any one… would attempt to visualise propositions,” as he wrote, it seems unlikely that he would ever have placed a 1968 Mercury Cyclone at the center of that overlap. (Not least of which because Venn died in 1923.) Yet the factors behind Steve Husnan’s late-1972 automotive choice, the very 1968 Mercury Cyclone you see before you, can be easily contained within the intersecting circles of a Venn diagram. The first circle was Steve’s location: stationed at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, Colorado, attending Technical Training School a long way from his Red Hook, New York, home. That necessarily limited the scope of where he could…