The Engines Nobody Puts on Their Poster Here is what happened at a stoplight in Lansing, Michigan, sometime in 1970. A guy in a Buick GSX pulls up next to a guy in a Chevelle SS 454. The Chevy driver…
The Car That Started a War In 1964, John DeLorean did something that should not have worked. He stuffed a 389 cubic inch engine from the full-size Pontiac Bonneville into a mid-size Tempest body, called it a GTO, and sold…
The Most Dangerous Thing About Chevy Was the Volume Walk into any swap meet in the country and you’ll find Chevy parts. Big-block heads, small-block cranks, intake manifolds stacked three deep against a folding table run by a guy in…
Ford Showed Up to the Fight with a Briefcase Full of Knives There’s a version of the muscle car story where Ford is the afterthought. Chevy gets the volume, Mopar gets the mystique, and Pontiac gets credit for starting the…
Before the HEMI, There Was the Max Wedge In 1962, before Chrysler had a hemispherical combustion chamber in any production car, they were already embarrassing people at the dragstrip with something called the Max Wedge. The 413 and later 426…
The Gun Goes Off in 1964 Pontiac pulled the trigger in 1964. John DeLorean and his crew stuffed a 389 cubic inch engine into a Tempest, called it a GTO, and dared the insurance actuaries to catch up. They did…
Guest Contributor
Ford’s 5.0 Coyote is a genuinely impressive piece of engineering. It’s also proof that you can do almost everything right and still produce something that feels like a spreadsheet made metal.
There’s a whole class of American car that never made the glossy magazine covers, never got the restoration budget, and never got the respect, until somebody figured out you could get a twenty-foot land yacht for three grand and have the coolest thing in the parking lot.
Guest Contributor
Every car company on earth has tried to bottle what Detroit did between 1964 and 1972. Every single one of them has failed. And the reason is something they could never admit out loud.
An electric motor does its job perfectly and leaves you completely unmoved. A big block at idle is doing something else entirely — and I’m not sure that something has a practical name.