The Encyclopedia Of Muscle Cars

Feel the heat--the street heat from the 1960s and 70, when the meanest, fastest, and most powerful cars tore up the streets. Jim Campisano, editor in chief of Muscle Mustangs & Fast Fords magazine, has written the ultimate, illustrated A to Z field guide of these supreme, extreme American vehicles. Muscle cars came onto the market when Detroit's "big three" manufacturers (Chevy, Ford, and Pontiac) decided to compete for a younger, more performance-obsessed buyer at the end of the 1950s. Gone were the bulky "land boats" with their huge fins; instead, out came lean ponycars, like the Dodge Coronet 500 Convertible and the Ford Falcon, pumped up on big-inch, high-compression, multiple-carburetor equipped super-mills. Though they were sold to the general public, any one of them, with only minor adjustments, could have won on the superspeedways of the NASCAR circuit. Even now, three decades after these gas-guzzling greyhounds went out of style, they regularly attract new generations of admirers throughout the world.