70 Fun Facts About Muscle Car

The 1949 Rocket 88, seen by some as the first muscle car, was built by which GM division?

Its small, light body and new overhead-valve V8 made it a sensation on the early NASCAR circuit, where it won six of nine late-model races in 1949.

'Rocket 88' (1951), often called the first rock and roll record, was cut in whose Memphis studio?

Credited to Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, the band was really Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm, and it featured the first distorted guitar on record.

The Pontiac GTO's name was borrowed from a 250 GTO built by which carmaker?

Purists were outraged that a Detroit intermediate had lifted the Gran Turismo Omologato badge from a homologated Italian racing car.

In 1964 the GTO was not a standalone car but an option package on which Pontiac model?

Offering the big engine as an option was a loophole around GM's policy against large engines in intermediate cars.

What was the displacement, in cubic inches, of the V8 in the original 1964 GTO?

Rated at 325 horsepower, the 389 turned a Tempest-based coupe into the car that lit off the muscle car era.

The 1969 GTO 'The Judge' took its name from a recurring comedy routine on which TV show?

The 'Here Come de Judge' bit was a national catchphrase, and Pontiac painted the first Judges Carousel Red to match the show's loud aesthetic.

The 2004 GTO revival was a rebadged version of which car?

Bob Lutz pushed the revival through, and the coupe was upgraded from the LS1 to the LS2 V8 for 2005.

The 1955 Chrysler C-300, first of the letter-series cars, was named for what?

The 331 cu in FirePower V8 made it a genuine 130 mph car and one of the earliest performance-first Detroit sedans.

Which letter did Chrysler skip in its 300 letter series?

The series ran from the 1955 C-300 through the 300L of 1965, eleven models in all.

Which Chrysler letter-series model was the first American car to make one horsepower per cubic inch?

The 1956 car's optional 355 hp engine beat Chevrolet's much-hyped 283 hp fuel-injected 283 to the milestone.

The Ford Mustang was officially introduced on April 17, 1964, at which event?

Because it arrived so far ahead of the normal model year, enthusiasts still call the earliest cars the '1964½' Mustang.

The first-generation Mustang shared its platform with which humble Ford compact?

Borrowing the compact's underpinnings kept the base price to $2,368 and let Ford build the car in enormous numbers.

The Mustang's arrival created a whole new class of car. What was it called?

Chevrolet's Camaro and Pontiac's Firebird followed within three years, and many writers count them as muscle cars too.

On the 1968 Shelby GT500KR, what did the letters 'KR' stand for?

The KR carried Ford's 428 Cobra Jet, and legend has it Shelby grabbed the name after hearing Chevrolet planned to use it.

The 1965–66 Shelby GT350 was powered by a Windsor V8 of what displacement, in cubic inches?

The HiPo K-Code engine was fitted with a big Holley four-barrel to lift output from 271 to 306 horsepower.

Which 1969 Mustang was built purely to homologate a new engine for NASCAR?

The engine was based on Ford's new 385-series big block, and the car was so understated that many buyers had no idea what they were looking at.

Chevrolet executives found the word 'Camaro' while reading a 1936 dictionary of which language?

Marketing later claimed the name meant 'a small, vicious animal that eats Mustangs'.

The original Camaro Z/28 used a special small-block V8 of what displacement, in cubic inches?

It was sized to squeeze under the five-litre limit of Trans-Am racing, and just 602 Z/28s were sold in 1967.

How many aluminum-block 427 COPO ZL1 Camaros were built in 1969?

Drag racer Dick Harrell dreamed up the package and Fred Gibb Chevrolet in La Harpe, Illinois placed the order.

Yenko Chevrolet, famous for stuffing 427s into Camaros, was in Canonsburg in which state?

Don Yenko took the store over from his father in 1957 and ordered 201 COPO Camaros in 1969 to convert into Yenko Camaros.

Chevrolet claimed how much gross horsepower for the 1970 Chevelle SS 454's LS6 engine?

It was the peak of the horsepower war; the solid-lifter, high-compression LS6 was never offered again in that tune.

In 1964, the Oldsmobile 4-4-2 name stood for a four-barrel carburetor, a four-speed manual and what?

The recipe was redefined the following year, when the first '4' came to mean 400 cubic inches.

In 1968 Olds partnered with which performance company on a 4-4-2-based car bearing its name?

Earlier cars had merely used the company's shifters; the 1968 partnership produced a whole car with a 455 that skirted GM's engine cap.

How many pound-feet of torque did the 1970 Buick GSX's 455 produce, an American record until 2003?

Only 678 GSXs were built in 1970, all in the second half of the model year.

The 1970 Buick GSX came in only two colours: Saturn Yellow and which other?

The split was lopsided: 187 cars in yellow and 491 in white.

Beginning in 1971, the Alabama Highway Patrol used which AMC coupe for pursuit and high-speed calls?

The same car won the Trans-Am title in 1971 and 1972, and the patrol bought 132 of them.

AMC's two-seat AMX of 1968–70 was one of just two American-built two-seaters. What was the other?

In January 1968 Craig Breedlove drove specially prepared AMXs to 106 world speed and endurance records at Goodyear's Texas track.

Pontiac's 1969 'performance and appearance package' WS4 for the Firebird borrowed its name from what?

The $1,083 package's badge outlived the racing series by decades and stayed on Firebirds until 2002.

In Smokey and the Bandit (1977), the Bandit runs blocker for a truck smuggling 400 cases of which beer?

Trans Am sales nearly doubled within two years of the film's release.

What colour were the two Mustang GTs Steve McQueen drove in Bullitt (1968)?

Both cars had the GT package and 390 FE V8s, and the chase runs roughly ten minutes with almost no music.

The surviving Bullitt Mustang was sold at Mecum in January 2020 for roughly how much?

The car had spent decades hidden by a New Jersey family who had bought it for $6,000 in 1974.

In a famous Bullitt continuity error, the villains' Charger loses how many wheel covers?

The same green Volkswagen Beetle is also passed several times over the course of the ten-minute sequence.

The General Lee's horn in The Dukes of Hazzard plays the first 12 notes of which song?

Estimates of how many Chargers the show wrecked range from about 255 to former cast member Ben Jones's figure of 325.

The General Lee is a Dodge Charger from which model year?

Its doors were welded shut, so Bo and Luke Duke climbed in through the windows.

How tall, in inches, was the rear wing on the 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona?

The wing was set that high partly to clear the trunk lid and put it in clean air; only 70 of the 503 Daytonas carried the 426 Hemi.

Who was the first NASCAR driver to top 200 mph, in a Charger Daytona at Talladega in March 1970?

He was driving the blue No. 88 Chrysler Engineering car in a test rather than a race.

Plymouth reportedly built the winged Superbird partly to lure which driver back from Ford?

Many Superbirds sat unsold on dealer lots as late as 1972.

NASCAR's one-car-per-two-dealers rule meant Plymouth had to build how many Superbirds?

The old rule had been a flat 500 units; the accepted final tally is 1,935 built and shipped.

How much did Plymouth pay Warner Bros. to use the Road Runner name on its 1968 muscle car?

It spent a further $10,000 developing the 'beep, beep' horn, and sold around 45,000 cars against a forecast of 20,000.

Which magazine named the Plymouth Road Runner its Car of the Year for 1969?

The stripped-down formula worked because it undercut increasingly upscale rivals while keeping the 383 V8 standard.

The 1964 Barracuda shared most of its parts with which Plymouth?

The exception was a 14.4-square-foot wraparound rear window, the largest ever fitted to a production car at the time.

How many 1971 Hemi 'Cuda convertibles were built?

Only seven were sold in the US, and one blue-on-blue four-speed car later fetched $3.5 million at auction.

In Vanishing Point (1971), Kowalski must deliver a white Challenger from Denver to which city by Monday?

Chrysler lent the production several Alpine White Challengers, and got them all back when filming wrapped.

From 1978, Dodge sold a Challenger that was actually a rebadged coupe from which manufacturer?

The Galant Lambda-based car kept the name alive through the malaise years until the muscle car returned in 2008.

The final Dodge Challenger, a black Demon 170, rolled off the line in 2023 at which plant?

Stellantis had announced two years earlier that 2023 would be the last model year for both the Challenger and the Charger.

How much did it cost to add the deleted passenger seat back to a 2018 Challenger SRT Demon?

The rear bench was the same price, and the car was billed as the first production car able to pull a wheelie.

Which sanctioning body banned the Challenger SRT Demon for lacking a certified roll cage?

The rule kicks in for any car that runs the quarter mile in under ten seconds, which the Demon did straight from the showroom.

How much horsepower does the 2023 Challenger SRT Demon 170 produce?

It also makes 945 lb-ft of torque, and one of them was the last Challenger ever built.

The 2015 Charger SRT Hellcat's supercharged 6.2-litre Hemi was rated at how much horsepower?

Dodge called it the fastest factory four-door sedan ever built, with a two-way average top speed of 204.55 mph.

Chrysler's 426 Hemi picked up what animal nickname for its power, weight and sheer size?

Ford's complaints got the Race Hemi banned from NASCAR in 1965 because it was not sold in production cars, so Chrysler answered with the Street Hemi.

In which year did Chrysler introduce the 'Street Hemi' to its intermediate cars to homologate it for NASCAR?

The street version was rated at 425 gross horsepower at 5,000 rpm, a figure widely regarded as conservative.

The 2014–2017 Chevrolet SS, a 415 hp V8 sedan based on the Commodore, was assembled in which country?

It died when Commodore production ended in 2017; a manual gearbox had been added for the 2015 model.

After the Clean Air Act of 1970, common US octane ratings dropped from 100 to what?

Lower octane forced carmakers to cut compression ratios, and gross horsepower ratings gave way to more honest SAE net figures.

Which US president signed the Clean Air Amendments of 1970 into law?

The law required a 90 percent cut in vehicle emissions and the newly created EPA began eliminating lead from gasoline in 1971.

The 1973 oil embargo that helped kill the muscle car followed which war?

The price of oil quadrupled from about $3 to nearly $12 a barrel, and buyers fled to lighter Japanese and German cars.

What was notable about the downsized 1974 Ford Mustang II?

It launched with a four-cylinder just as the fuel crisis hit, and a V8 did not return until 1975.

In 1961 Chevrolet offered an SS package on the Impala with a 409 V8. How much did the SS package cost?

The 409 was famous enough that the Beach Boys wrote a song about it the following year.

Dodge's Super Bee name has its basis in what?

It was Dodge's answer to the Road Runner's success, priced at $3,271 on the Coronet body.

The 1969 Ford Torino Talladega, an aero car built for NASCAR, won that season's title with which driver?

Only about 754 were built in the first few weeks of 1969, alongside the near-identical Mercury Cyclone Spoiler II.

The revived fifth-generation Camaro reprised the role of which Transformer in the film sequels?

The concept was unveiled at the 2006 Detroit show and the production car went on sale in April 2009.

The 2012 Camaro ZL1's supercharged 6.2 L LSA V8 was rated at how much horsepower?

It was the most powerful Camaro Chevrolet had ever sold at the time, and revived a badge last used in 1969.

The all-aluminium 5.0-litre V8 that arrived in the 2011 Mustang GT was codenamed what?

The retro fifth-generation Mustang had launched for 2005 in a style its designer J Mays called 'retro-futurism'.

In Gone in 60 Seconds (2000), how many cars must Memphis Raines steal in 72 hours?

The prize car, Eleanor, is a 1967 Mustang fastback dressed up as a Shelby GT500.

In The Fast and the Furious (2001), Dom Toretto's 1970 Charger R/T originally belonged to whom?

He finally drives it to avenge Jesse, and the climactic race ends with Brian handing over the keys to his Supra.

The 2024 Dodge Charger Daytona was the first production muscle car to launch with what?

Dodge kept the Daytona name from its winged NASCAR special of the muscle-car era for the battery-powered relaunch.

The 1957 Rambler Rebel, the fastest stock US sedan of its day, was built by which company?

It was the first mid-sized car with a big-block V8, and its 7.5-second 0–60 time predates the GTO by seven years.

The 1956 Studebaker Golden Hawk was powered by a 352 cu in V8 borrowed from which marque?

At 275 hp it was the second most powerful engine of its day, behind only the Chrysler 300.

How many Ford Galaxie 'R-code' cars were factory-built for drag racing in 1963?

With fiberglass panels, aluminum bumpers and a 427 rated at 425 hp, the full-size car ran the quarter-mile in just over 12 seconds.

Which 1965 model was the first Australian car offered with a V8 engine?

Its optional 273 cu in Chrysler LA engine was imported from the United States and made 181 bhp.

The 1963 Holden EH S4 was built to homologate it for the Armstrong 500 race at which circuit?

Only 120 road cars were made, with a six-cylinder engine enlarged to 2.9 litres.