So what is a muscle car, anyway? That’s the first question to answer when compiling a list of ten of the best of the breed, and the answer is not as straightforward as you might think.
Many purists will point to a golden muscle car era in the 1960s and early 1970s, when the ‘big three’ American car companies - Ford, GM and Chrysler – competed for custom with massively powerful V8 engines shoe-horned under the hoods of relatively ordinary two-door bread and butter cars. The resulting creations offered staggering performance for their time – in a straight line at least - and at prices the average driver could still afford.
Names from that era like the Ford Mustang and Pontiac Trans Am are some of the most familiar, not least because they’ve been popularised through period films like Bullitt and Smokey and the Bandit. Others from that classic muscle car period like the Pontiac GTO, the Hemi ’Cuda and the Plymouth Superbird are legendary amongst muscle car fans too.
But the muscle car concept didn’t start and end in a few short years in the sixties and seventies. As early as 1949, Oldsmobile took a leaf out of the hot-rodding handbook by fitting a 140bhp V8 engine into a smaller car designed for a six-cylinder engine of much lower power. The Oldsmobile 88 Rocket was followed in 1957 by the 190bhp V8-powered Rambler Rebel, and spurred on by racing successes on the drag-strip, bigger V8-engined performance versions of intermediate size cars appeared from many more of the US brands.
Power outputs soared towards – and occasionally beyond – the 500bhp mark, and who knows where the muscle car power race would have ended if the fuel crisis hadn’t intervened in the early 1970s bringing rationing and price hikes to gas stations across the US. The Clean Air Act brought with it new emissions equipment that strangled the performance of 1970s engines too, and the US muscle car era was over.
Over until 2004, that is, when Pontiac re-launched a GTO model and Chrysler followed on a year later with a new 300C. Both were powerful, modern day takes on cars that offered big performance in the original muscle car days. Since then we’ve seen modern day interpretations of a range of muscle car classics including the Chevrolet Camaro, Ford Mustang and Dodge Challenger – all offering monster V8 muscle and performance to match.
With that in mind, we’ve not followed the purist route for our muscle car appreciation, but have included models from 1949 to the present day.
So click the links and read on for our top 10 guide to some of the best muscle cars to ever tear up the tarmac...
The 10 best muscle cars of all time
- • 1. 1964 Pontiac GTO
- • 2. 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle SS 454
- • 3. 1970 Plymouth Road Runner Superbird
- • 4. 1967 Chevrolet Camaro Z/28
- • 5. 1949 Oldsmobile Rocket 88
- • 6. 1965 Shelby Mustang GT-350
- • 7. 1968 Chevrolet Corvette L88
- • 8. 1964 Ford Fairlane Thunderbolt
- • 9. 2015 Dodge Challenger Hellcat
- • 10. 1971 Plymouth Hemi 'Cuda
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