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This muscle car quiz has 70 free questions with answers and runs from the 1949 Oldsmobile Rocket 88 through the Pontiac GTO, the winged Mopar aero cars, the Hemi 'Cuda and the LS6 Chevelle, on to the insurance surcharges, the Clean Air Act and the oil embargo that ended the first era, and finally the retro revival that gave us the 707 hp Hellcat and the 1,025 hp Demon 170. It is written for people who know the difference between a Road Runner and a Super Bee, and for movie fans who know the General Lee, the Bullitt Mustang and Kowalski's white Challenger. Questions range from easy nameplate history to expert-level production numbers. Every answer was checked against the relevant Wikipedia article and its cited sources before publication, so the numbers, dates and horsepower figures are the documented ones rather than bench-racing legend.
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Q 01The 1949 Rocket 88, seen by some as the first muscle car, was built by which GM division?
Oldsmobile
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.
Q 02'Rocket 88' (1951), often called the first rock and roll record, was cut in whose Memphis studio?
Sam Phillips
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.
Q 03The Pontiac GTO's name was borrowed from a 250 GTO built by which carmaker?
Ferrari
Purists were outraged that a Detroit intermediate had lifted the Gran Turismo Omologato badge from a homologated Italian racing car.
Q 04In 1964 the GTO was not a standalone car but an option package on which Pontiac model?
LeMans
Offering the big engine as an option was a loophole around GM's policy against large engines in intermediate cars.
Q 05What was the displacement, in cubic inches, of the V8 in the original 1964 GTO?
389
Rated at 325 horsepower, the 389 turned a Tempest-based coupe into the car that lit off the muscle car era.
Q 06The 1969 GTO 'The Judge' took its name from a recurring comedy routine on which TV show?
Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In
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.
Q 07The 2004 GTO revival was a rebadged version of which car?
Holden Monaro
Bob Lutz pushed the revival through, and the coupe was upgraded from the LS1 to the LS2 V8 for 2005.
Q 08The 1955 Chrysler C-300, first of the letter-series cars, was named for what?
Its power output
The 331 cu in FirePower V8 made it a genuine 130 mph car and one of the earliest performance-first Detroit sedans.
Q 09Which letter did Chrysler skip in its 300 letter series?
I
The series ran from the 1955 C-300 through the 300L of 1965, eleven models in all.
Q 10Which Chrysler letter-series model was the first American car to make one horsepower per cubic inch?
300B
The 1956 car's optional 355 hp engine beat Chevrolet's much-hyped 283 hp fuel-injected 283 to the milestone.
Q 11The Ford Mustang was officially introduced on April 17, 1964, at which event?
The World's Fair
Because it arrived so far ahead of the normal model year, enthusiasts still call the earliest cars the '1964½' Mustang.
Q 12The first-generation Mustang shared its platform with which humble Ford compact?
Falcon
Borrowing the compact's underpinnings kept the base price to $2,368 and let Ford build the car in enormous numbers.
Q 13The Mustang's arrival created a whole new class of car. What was it called?
Pony cars
Chevrolet's Camaro and Pontiac's Firebird followed within three years, and many writers count them as muscle cars too.
Q 21Chevrolet claimed how much gross horsepower for the 1970 Chevelle SS 454's LS6 engine?
450
It was the peak of the horsepower war; the solid-lifter, high-compression LS6 was never offered again in that tune.
Q 22In 1964, the Oldsmobile 4-4-2 name stood for a four-barrel carburetor, a four-speed manual and what?
Dual exhausts
The recipe was redefined the following year, when the first '4' came to mean 400 cubic inches.
Q 23In 1968 Olds partnered with which performance company on a 4-4-2-based car bearing its name?
Hurst
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.
Q 14On the 1968 Shelby GT500KR, what did the letters 'KR' stand for?
King of the Road
The KR carried Ford's 428 Cobra Jet, and legend has it Shelby grabbed the name after hearing Chevrolet planned to use it.
Q 15The 1965–66 Shelby GT350 was powered by a Windsor V8 of what displacement, in cubic inches?
289
The HiPo K-Code engine was fitted with a big Holley four-barrel to lift output from 271 to 306 horsepower.
Q 16Which 1969 Mustang was built purely to homologate a new engine for NASCAR?
Boss 429
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.
Q 17Chevrolet executives found the word 'Camaro' while reading a 1936 dictionary of which language?
French
Marketing later claimed the name meant 'a small, vicious animal that eats Mustangs'.
Q 18The original Camaro Z/28 used a special small-block V8 of what displacement, in cubic inches?
302
It was sized to squeeze under the five-litre limit of Trans-Am racing, and just 602 Z/28s were sold in 1967.
Q 19How many aluminum-block 427 COPO ZL1 Camaros were built in 1969?
69
Drag racer Dick Harrell dreamed up the package and Fred Gibb Chevrolet in La Harpe, Illinois placed the order.
Q 20Yenko Chevrolet, famous for stuffing 427s into Camaros, was in Canonsburg in which state?
Pennsylvania
Don Yenko took the store over from his father in 1957 and ordered 201 COPO Camaros in 1969 to convert into Yenko Camaros.
Q 24How many pound-feet of torque did the 1970 Buick GSX's 455 produce, an American record until 2003?
510
Only 678 GSXs were built in 1970, all in the second half of the model year.
Q 25The 1970 Buick GSX came in only two colours: Saturn Yellow and which other?
Apollo White
The split was lopsided: 187 cars in yellow and 491 in white.
Q 26Beginning in 1971, the Alabama Highway Patrol used which AMC coupe for pursuit and high-speed calls?
Javelin
The same car won the Trans-Am title in 1971 and 1972, and the patrol bought 132 of them.
Q 27AMC's two-seat AMX of 1968–70 was one of just two American-built two-seaters. What was the other?
Corvette
In January 1968 Craig Breedlove drove specially prepared AMXs to 106 world speed and endurance records at Goodyear's Texas track.
Q 28Pontiac's 1969 'performance and appearance package' WS4 for the Firebird borrowed its name from what?
An SCCA racing series
The $1,083 package's badge outlived the racing series by decades and stayed on Firebirds until 2002.
Q 29In Smokey and the Bandit (1977), the Bandit runs blocker for a truck smuggling 400 cases of which beer?
Coors
Trans Am sales nearly doubled within two years of the film's release.
Q 30What colour were the two Mustang GTs Steve McQueen drove in Bullitt (1968)?
Highland Green
Both cars had the GT package and 390 FE V8s, and the chase runs roughly ten minutes with almost no music.