Gadgetory

with the recent arrival of the new and rather impressive Chevy Corvette we thought it'd be a nice time to look back at some very cool classic American muscle cars that were made in relatively limited numbers and had some very cool tech I'm Brian Cooley with my top five muscle cars that we can hear echoes of today we're gonna rank these guys by their rarity of production let's go number five 64 Pontiac GTO in the tri power configuration about 8200 of these John DeLorean gave it its name he was working at GM at the time inspired by Ferraris grand turismo on the lo gato nomenclature of the same era blasphemy too many Ferrari Ste since this was basically a Pontiac LeMans another optimistic American use of European car terminology but add the optional tripower triple two barrel carb package and you're getting 348 horsepower from the very first muscle car today you can draw a pretty straight line from the GTO idea to performance tears today like BMW M ODS Mercedes AMG although I noticed they never call their cars things like Talladega number four the 69 Mustang 428 Cobra Jet 2,870 made Mustang was a pony car faring poorly in the street drag culture back in the early part of the muscle car era so Ford made up for it by wedging their 428 big-block into that car and topping it with the freer breathing heads from the even more impressive 427 engine they also gave it a ram air scoop bigger intake valves all of this foreshadowing the theme today of working on freer breathing engines for faster running the end result in this Mustang was 411 horsepower and those same physics lessons that it brought to the market underlie today's trend toward things like air in tank kits so I'm afraid nothing will make your Mitsubishi sound like an R code mustang number 3 68 Dodge Charger r/t Hemi 467 copies 68 was the first year for the charger in its coke bottle shaped with that wide inset real still fresh looking today you know this guy as the bad guys badass car in the chase scene from Bullitt now when you add the 426 Hemi option that's where the badass part came from 425 horsepower 490 foot-pounds of torque Hemi refers to the fact the engine had hemispherical combustion chamber roofs other engines did and do but nobody markets it like Chrysler number two the 69 Camaro zl1 just 69 were made this zl1 was created by specking a rather arcane factory option code called COPO 95/60 that added a $4,000 427 v8 to a $2,200 car it made over 500 horsepower and did 0 to 60 on slippery old-school tires and is still impressive today 5.3 seconds by the way those optional zl1 engines were hand-built in what was basically a cleanroom overseen by none other than one Zora arkus-duntov the head engineer of the Vette before we get to number one the car that could have been accepted really isn't a production car and not fully an American car it's the 67 Shelby Cobra 427 Super Snake they just made - as if a 427 Ford v8 wasn't enough Carroll Shelby bolted on a pair of superchargers for a total of 800 horse in a car that weighs about the same as your fat uncle after a big meal of the two made Shelby kept one for himself gave the other to Bill Cosby who scared himself so bad he immediately gave it back at which time it was sold through the Ford dealer in San Francisco to some other guy who also couldn't handle it and drove it off a cliff into the Pacific Ocean that's why performance cars have abs and traction control today our number one classic American muscle car that foreshadowed the future the 71 Hemi Cuda convertible yes just 11 of these Plymouth's were made in ragtop form with the 426 Hemi is the last year that engine was offered by the way in production incredibly rare especially since most muscle cars were incredibly shoddily made this was an interesting example of something we take for granted today extreme performance and a ragtop it took some decades of engineering later to get that to really work without cars turning themselves into pretzels and today you find high horsepower cars that give up nothing by having their roof go down you can trace that back to the Hemi Cuda drop-top for more high-tech cars back then today and tomorrow check out CNET on cars.com i'm brian Cooley thanks for watching