Hemmings Muscle Machines September 2024

"After a few years go by, that trunk can turn into a treasure chest of sorts." I have been threatening to extract my ’69 Camaro from its cocoon in the back of my garage for too long, and finally, with the arrival of better weather, I’ve done just that. I’m thankful to have the indoor space at home to house three cars, but it’s really a two-car garage, and the ’69 is the one that wound up sideways across the back on dollies. It’s out of the elements and accessible but getting it out takes some doing. As a result, it had been sitting longer than I’d care to admit. So, when it rolled into the sunshine on a recent Saturday for the first time in a few years, I was pretty excited and feeling a…

PRODUCTION LINE It only arrived in 2022, barely a year after the thinly veiled “concept” was introduced in late 2020: the first proper Jeep (i.e., one where the roof and doors come off) with V-8 power since 1981, when AMC’s emissions-strangled 304-cubic-inch eight produced a neck-snapping 125 horsepower. And now, the gonzo Jeep Wrangler Rubicon 392, one more brightly burning 470-horse star in the Stellantis constellation, is flickering out. It marks the final application of Chrysler’s third-gen Hemi engine, launched more than two decades ago, in anything resembling a standard passenger-vehicle. (Hemis will still be available in 2500-and-higher-level Ram trucks.) The good news: there are still 470 naturally aspirated horsepower available at the flex of your right ankle. The chassis remains packed with the same 392-cubic-inch Hemi V-8 that you…

Letter of the Month: Many Returns Every muscle car fan has that one car they should have never sold. Mine was a 1965 GTO, in keeping with the theme of Terry McGean’s column in HMM (“Finding the Middle,” HMM #251). I bought the car in 1979. The previous owner had blown up the motor but had bought another beater 1965 GTO with a good 389 Tri-Power. I bought both cars for $700! I pulled the engine out of the beater, had it rebuilt, and put it in the “good” car (and sold the beater). The good GTO had recently been painted and needed no interior work. I added new wheels and tires (and no, those are not Cragar S/S – those are American SS). The good car came with…

MODIFIEDSPOTLIGHT: Chevy Muscle ALTHOUGH Aaron Oberle wasn’t looking for a 1965 Chevrolet Chevelle when he set out to build a true Pro Touring machine, that’s what he got. He also wasn’t planning on cancer to disrupt his plans, but more on that in a moment. It was 2011 when the project-car hunt began. Aaron was dead-set on a 1964 Pontiac A-body—a Tempest or a Le Mans or even a reasonably priced GTO. What he found instead was a very original 1965 Chevelle that had been a grandpa’s car in New Hampshire. “I hadn’t considered a Malibu, but the thing I really wanted with the ’64 Pontiac was the side-by-side headlights,” he says. “I’ve always preferred that look to the stacked lights that came in 1965. The Chevelle still had the…

STOCK IT’S A STORY we’ve heard countless times: “Man, I miss that car. I sold it when I was starting my family, but I wish I had it back.” It’s as if a fun car and family life are somehow mutually exclusive, symbolizing the old “When I grew up, I put away childish things,” trope that dates to antiquity. So, we were pleased to meet Ric Heath, a retired police officer from Mesa, Arizona, the original owner of this ’70 Ford Torino Cobra, who specifically bought it to be his family car. Torino Cobra was Ford’s range-topping high-performance mid-size coupe for 1970. It was all driveline, with few frills: With its base Thunder Jet mill, packing cylinder heads with canted 2.09/1.65-inch valves, a 600-cfm Autolite four-barrel atop a cast-iron intake,…

SPOTLIGHT: Chevy Muscle THERE ONCE WAS A TIME, believe it or not, when even the idea of the LS engine platform hadn’t yet been conceived, and a seemingly endless supply of first-gen small-block Chevrolet fed the dreams of millions of performance enthusiasts. But while the supply of early small-blocks may have diminished in recent years, the legend lives on. First introduced in 1955, the 265-cu.in. version was the main source of motivation for the newly redesigned Chevy passenger cars and light trucks. The new engine’s compact, lightweight design and potential to produce impressive power made it an instant hit with the performance crowd and it quickly usurped the venerable Ford flathead as the preferred power source for nearly everything on wheels. Inspired by its popularity, the engineers at GM pushed…