Top 10 best muscle cars
Good old American muscle is a hard thing to beat, so here are our top 10 best muscle cars ever built
To even consider what the best muscle cars of all time are, a simple question must be answered first. What is a muscle car? For many, a muscle car has to be American (and therefore made by the likes of Chevrolet, Ford or Chrysler), it has to have a big V8 engine and it has to come from the era when the people who lived one quarter mile at a time had never heard of Vin Diesel.
As a result, it is classic American automobiles such as Dodge’s original Challenger that many regard as the cream of the muscle car crop. Quite often, these older vintage cars have had their iconic status cemented thanks to appearances in cult films, such as Ford’s Mustang in Bullitt and Pontiac’s Trans Am in Smokey and the Bandit.
In truth, these legends from the sixties and seventies did not start the muscle car movement. All the way back in the late 1940s Oldsmobile decided to shoehorn a V8 under the bonnet of a model designed to use a less powerful six-cylinder engine. Following the tyre tracks of Oldsmobile, in 1957 a V8-powered Rambler Rebel arrived and found much success on the drag-strip – which is basically an American institution.
It wasn’t long before other US car brands were slotting large engines into everyday cars and using motorsport success to help drive sales. Soon muscle car power outputs were getting close to (and sometimes exceeding) 500bhp – but the 1973 fuel crisis soon cut demand for these big capacity, petrol hungry models. If it hadn’t, who knows how crazy the performance figures would have got. A terrifying thought considering how bad some early muscle cars were at going around corners and stopping.
The seventies also marked the USA’s introduction of the American Clean Air Act – which ushered in more emissions control equipment. No bad thing, but the technology hampered engine performance. As such, the American muscle car slipped into the shadows until well after the year 2000.
Pontiac was the first marque to get things going again when it relaunched a GTO model, while Chrysler and Dodge soon followed with a new 300C and Charger. All were powerful, modern-day takes on cars that had ancestry dating back to the muscle car’s heyday. Since then we’ve seen new interpretations of a range of classics including the Chevrolet Camaro, Ford Mustang and Dodge Challenger – all packing monster V8 muscle and performance to match.
Click the links and read on for our top 10 guide to some of the best muscle cars to ever tear up the tarmac...
