Hemmings Muscle Machines November 2023

I can usually convince myself that fixing something cheaper is the right decision. While attempting to straighten up my garage a couple weeks ago, I came across a pair of fenders for my ’69 Camaro that have been leaning against the wall in the back corner for a few years. I’ve had those two fenders since the ’80s; they were both still bolted to my car until around 2005 when I finally replaced them with a pair of new reproductions. Still, even after getting the brand-new fenders, I couldn’t quite part with the old ones. As you might guess, those two old fenders came off the car because each has issues. The driver’s side is the car’s original, so it has the requisite rot hole in the bottom, plus other…

PRODUCTION LINE In the ‘60s, Carroll Shelby launched the G.T. 350R: a super-strippo racer designed (and destined) to conquer the nation’s road courses. It took three decades, but in rapid succession, for ‘93 and ’95, Ford launched two generations of the Mustang Cobra R — the first packing a breathed-on 5-liter, the latter receiving a fuel-injected 351 and fully capable of going 12s on the drag strip despite its road-course leanings. Another Cobra R arrived in the year 2000 — this time with a 385-horsepower, naturally aspirated four-cam 5.4-liter Modular V-8 and a six-speed. Each of these — devoid of niceties like air conditioning, sound deadening, carpet, and the like, but packing power and chassis tweaks aplenty — cost a premium over the street-spec models. Of the handful of each…

Letter of the Month: The Rest of the Story I really enjoy being a subscriber to HMM. I was especially interested in the article by Eric English, “The Contender,” in the September 2023 issue (HMM #241). In the article, there were questions about the history of this rare ’Cuda. I know much of the history before it was restored and wanted to share it with HMM so you could pass it along to Eric and current owner Bob Leenstra. I was with Chrysler Performance Parts and Direct Connection from 1972 to 1980 and knew many of the racers. Thank you for remembering Dave Wren in the same story. He was an exceptional racer, able to build fast cars and engines as well as drive. The Chrysler Race Group was always…

STOCK AT FIRST GLANCE, you may think the subheading of this article is something akin to clickbait. After all, who in the world has ever purchased a 1969 ZL-1 Camaro for $1,000? The COPO option alone cost $4,160, and that was in Nixon-era money. Well, in 1976, Don Martens Jr., then residing in Cleveland, Ohio, bought this ZL-1 Camaro for that paltry price. At the time, the pony car was rumored to have been a COPO 427, but he didn’t know if it was built with an iron L72 or the aluminum ZL-1. That uncertainty was created by a theft, but more on that later. Fred Gibb, the owner of a La Harpe, Illinois, Chevrolet dealership that bore his name, had already used the division’s Central Office Production Order (COPO)…

ON LOCATION SPOTLIGHT: Competition Muscle THE FACTORY APPEARING /Stock Tire (F.A.S.T.) racers have had a long affiliation with HMM, and we can remember the magazine offering a $1,000 bounty for one of the first 9-second passes in the class. Lane Carey’s class record in 2010 of 9.842 seconds at 139.82 mph stood for over eight years, until Terry Pennington took it by just .002 second. Never did we think that these cars would continue to evolve as much as they have, but the number of cars in F.A.S.T.’s 9-Second Club now stands at 12. The offseason was filled with chatter about what would come next. It became obvious that the top racers in the class all had their sights set on the same goal: Being the first car on stock…

WHEN DODGE grabbed the previously used Dart nameplate to be the new moniker for its compact A-body platform for 1963, it marketed the model as a workaday, economical family car for the masses. The new Dart replaced the Lancer in the lineup, which had been the Dodge version of the original Valiant, and Dart continued to carry the torch for thrift-conscious transport at the division, offering just two engine choices, both of them Slant Sixes: the base 170-cu.in version rated at 101 hp and its more powerful sibling, the 225, pushing out a much better, though still tepid, 145 hp. As the ’60s rolled on, the Big Three’s compacts would all gain V-8 engine options, and some would evolve into mini muscle cars, including the Dart, being offered with the…