Hemmings Muscle Machines December 2023

What was it that made me refuse to let go of something that could have been replaced with a better example...? What is it that leads to the forming of a bond between a particular vehicle and its owner? It’s a question I’ve pondered many times over the years, usually after meeting someone at a car show and hearing his or her tale of long-term ownership. Very often these backstories unfold like sagas, arching over many years and including multiple challenges that had to be overcome. This month’s issue has more than one such tale of long-term perseverance that got me thinking about such things once again. In the case of the ZL-1 Camaro featured in our Restoration Profile, the story began even before owner Don Martens was able to…

In the world of racing, there are two abiding classes: cars that were built to race, bound by creed and construction to the confines of the infinite road course, and cars built for the open road, later reclaimed, reconstructed, and reborn to race. Rarely is the status quo contested, yet Ford, in collaboration with Multimatic, has done just that with the newly minted Mustang GTD. Born of speed, sculpted by lap times, engineered to do battle at the ‘Ring long before the boulevard, the GTD is an anomaly. Even its nomenclature harkens to the IMSA “GTD” racing class it was built for. Purpose-built to fuel Ford’s wartime racing efforts in Europe, Mustang GTD is the road-going version of a GT3 supercar and designed to put Ford’s iconic nameplate on the…

Letter of the Month: Father/Daughter Project Thank you for the great magazine, I’m a longtime subscriber. The no-nonsense approach you use to supply content is second to none. I thought I’d share my latest story with you. I’m a diehard GM guy, so of course, when my 13-year-old daughter got the car bug, she started asking about… Mustangs. At that point, I had to decide: Do I dig in my heels on a GM product, or do I let this path establish itself? Recently a pair of Mustangs came up for sale locally, so I told her we’d go look. We looked at both being offered: a Lime Gold ’68 notchback and a school bus yellow ’66 notchback. The ‘68 was rough, but the bones were there, and my daughter…

MODIFIEDSPOTLIGHT: Mopar Muscle EVERY FAMILY HAS a character perched in its family tree with personality traits that effectively define them. The charmer. The ne’er-do-well. The success. They make encounters that define lives. Your family has one of these characters too, and you know the stories — they’re regularly told and retold at holiday time, until the tales simply become family legend. But what happens when that legend is a car? What’s the result when a physical artifact is so often recalled, so warmly praised, so cherished? To understand what this mildly breathed-on factory 426 Street Wedge/four-speed ’64 Plymouth Sport Fury means to Karl Williams of Bozeman, Montana, we first have to talk to Karl’s uncle, Keith. Keith Williams, now of Lincoln, Washington, knew the lineage of another red-on-red, factory four-speed…

STOCK “IT’S ONLY ORIGINAL ONCE,” the mantra goes. Really, that only matters if the car in question isn’t a rusting, immovable hunk of twisted metal: patina is one thing, but “it’s only original once” doesn’t matter if you can see the pavement through the rust in the rockers and floors, or if it’s only running on five cylinders. Originality is awesome, but it stems from having careful owners from new; having it stay nice for decades, and even avoiding the “one careful repaint in the ‘90s” syndrome, is another issue entirely. Such is the case with the 390-powered 1968 Mercury Cyclone fastback seen on these pages. It was purchased out of Townsend Lincoln-Mercury in the greater San Diego area and lived there for the bulk of its life. Its original…

ON LOCATION IN CERTAIN PARTS of the United States, you can stay busy running the roads to monthly cruise-in events, community car shows and cars-and-coffee style events. It seems to be a well saturated market, but also a stale one. You may see the same cars, parked in the same place nearly every time you go. At those events, you’ll see some high-performance staples: Camaro Super Sport, Mustang Mach 1 and Dodge Charger R/T come to mind, but you’ll rarely come across true muscle car royalty out in the wild. That’s because cars like LS6 Chevelles, COPO Novas and Yenko Camaros are very valuable, and the owners rarely want to expose them to the elements. As muscle car lovers, we’ve been trained to idolize these cars and protect them from…