Hemmings Muscle Machines November 2024

“Then, one day, as I rolled by and instinctively looked over, I saw the Camaro with a ‘For Sale’ sign in the window.” Vintage car enthusiasts tend to harbor dreams with a common theme that entails finding a choice example of their favorite make and model, long cared for by a single owner, finally offered for sale. The scenario often involves a recently deceased owner, with the vehicle being sold by the next of kin; the full-blown fantasy version includes a bargain price as a bonus. These days, just getting a shot at being the buyer in that sort of situation, regardless of price, is cause enough for a thrill. It happened recently for a good friend, and though it wasn’t a muscle car, it was a close parallel: a 1970 Chevy C-10 short-bed pickup. The Chevy…

Someone’s finally gone and done it. A production vehicle, built by someone other than a boutique hypercar outfit that no one outside the Robb Report has ever heard of, packing more than 1,000 horsepower, with a payment book and a warranty, is on its way. It should be here a year from the time you read these words. The performance numbers for Chevrolet’s 2025 Corvette ZR1 read like a demented schoolboy’s delusional fantasy: 1,064 horsepower at 7,000 rpm, with 828 lb-ft of torque, from Chevy’s new 5.5-liter, DOHC twin-turbo flat-plane-crank V-8; call it LT7 for short. Top speed? 215 mph. Sub-ten-second quarter-mile times. At 333.3 cubic inches, that’s 3.19 horsepower per cubic inch. With a curb weight approaching 3,800 pounds (3,670 dry), that’s 3.57 pounds per horsepower. That’s the power…

Letter of the Month: Circling Back One of the first columns I read each issue is Terry McGean’s, and then I move on to Backfire. Like a lot of readers, I also had one car I wished I had kept, there were others but my first Fairlane was the one. I worked at a Ford dealership right out of high school as an apprentice mechanic when a very low mileage ’66 Fairlane GT with a 390 and four-speed came in. As an employee, I got it for a song. It took a while, but I had many happy weekends at the now gone Bonneville (Raceway) dragstrip in Salt Lake, Utah. While not the fastest, it turned many mid-to-low 13-second times and won its share of races. When I finally got…

MODIFIED IF EVER THERE WAS a TV show that inspired its viewers to an enduring admiration for a certain muscle car, without a doubt, that show is the southern-situated, action-comedy series, The Dukes of Hazzard, which debuted in 1979. Those poor Duke boys were constantly being harassed by local law enforcement, just because they rode around in what was supposed to be a mildly tamed stock car. Well, maybe also because they’d dabbled a little in the bootleg liquor trade in their past. Well, that and a few other things, but man, Bo and Luke’s ’69 Dodge Charger, dubbed the “General Lee,” was a hero car for the ages, and the image of that bright orange Mopar was burned deeply into the cerebrums of many budding young hot rodders who…

G.T. GRAN TURISMO (or, in English, Grand Touring). Two little letters that, when slapped on the flanks of an automobile, carry a certain set of values: high-performance, pro-enthusiast, with a dollop of comfort and drivability thrown in for good measure. The working definition is that of a sporting 2+2 that can effortlessly devour vast distances at high speeds in supreme comfort, while having enough luggage space to accommodate a long weekend’s gear. It’s a nebulous designation, living in the grey area between sports car, coupe, and 2+2. A GT is all of these, and none of them. The Federacion Internacional de l’Automobile (FIA, the world’s auto-racing sanctioning body) calls a GT car “an open or closed automobile which has no more than one door on each side, and a minimum of…

FOR MORE THAN A QUARTER of a century, an annual gathering of historic Super Cars has been taking place to celebrate the rarest of all General Motors muscle cars. While the name Super Car Reunion may offer visions of Ferrari and other high-end sports cars, it refers to the outstanding high-performance cars that were a product of Yenko, Gibb, Nickey, and other notable icons of the Chevrolet muscle car world. While the Super Car Reunion isn’t exclusive to the Chevrolet camp, it has naturally become Chevy heavy, as it features quite a few COPO and Yenko combinations. The committee that organizes the event encourages all makes and models from the muscle car era to participate, although the primary focus is specially ordered cars and factory race cars. The unique part…