Autodelta, Alfa Romeo’s racing arm, produced the Giulia Sprint GTA by taking the standard Sprint GT coupe and replacing most of its steel body panels with aluminum. The result — GTA stands for Gran Turismo Alleggerita, lightened — weighed approximately 745 kilograms, which is roughly half the weight of a modern compact car and 200 kilograms less than the standard Sprint GT it was derived from. Into this lightweight package went a 1,570cc twin-cam four-cylinder that produced 115 horsepower in road tune and upward of 170 in full race preparation, driving through a five-speed gearbox to a limited-slip differential.

The Dodge Charger Daytona is one of the more extreme objects ever to wear a manufacturer’s badge and a license plate simultaneously. The 18-inch aluminum nose cone that replaced the standard Charger’s front end was designed in a wind tunnel at the Lockheed facility in Burbank. The 23-inch rear wing — positioned high enough that the trunk lid could still open — was there not for aesthetics but because the aerodynamics of the standard Charger body at 200 miles per hour produced lift that made the car dangerously unstable. Chrysler’s engineers needed the downforce. They also needed to sell 500 examples to homologate the car for NASCAR. They built 503.

The 1970 model year was the last before emissions regulations, insurance industry pressure, and fuel economy concerns began the systematic reduction of American muscle car performance. Chevrolet, aware of what was coming, produced the 1970 Chevelle SS 454 in the full knowledge that it represented a high-water mark that would not be repeated. The LS6 engine variant — 454 cubic inches, solid lifters, high-compression heads, and a factory rating of 450 horsepower that was understood at the time to be conservative — was the most powerful engine Chevrolet offered in a passenger car in 1970 and arguably the most powerful engine Chevrolet has offered in a passenger car since.

Engine oil is the most important consumable in an automobile and the one whose selection generates the most confident misinformation from people who should know better. The advice circulating in service station waiting rooms, online forums, and casual conversations among car owners contains a remarkable quantity of mythology about viscosity grades, synthetic versus conventional formulations, and the optimal change interval — most of it wrong in ways that range from harmless to genuinely damaging.

The claim that the BMW 2002 invented the sport sedan is made with enough regularity in automotive writing that it risks losing its meaning. It is nevertheless accurate. Before the 2002, performance cars were sports cars — two seats, impractical luggage space, a driving experience that required commitment and sacrifice. The 2002 demonstrated that a four-seat, practical saloon could be as rewarding to drive as a sports car while remaining useful for the everyday purposes that sports cars excluded. The 3 Series, the M3, and forty years of sport sedan development trace directly to what BMW did with the 02 series body and a 2.0-liter four-cylinder engine in 1966.

The new BMW M5 will do zero to sixty in 3.4 seconds. It weighs 2,445 kilograms. These two facts exist in a tension that the M division has spent considerable engineering effort resolving and that no amount of engineering can fully reconcile. The car is extraordinarily fast. It is also extraordinarily heavy, and the M5 lineage — from the E28 original through the E39 that most enthusiasts consider the definition of the breed — was built on the proposition that performance and mass should not coexist if the goal is driver engagement.

Cesare Fiorio, Lancia’s competition director, decided in 1970 that the Fulvia — which had won the World Rally Championship in 1972 — was obsolete and that Lancia needed a purpose-built rally car rather than an adapted road car. The car that resulted from this decision was designed by Bertone’s Marcello Gandini, powered by the Ferrari Dino 246’s 2.4-liter V6, and homologated for competition by producing exactly 492 road cars. It won the World Rally Championship in 1974, 1975, and 1976. Then Fiat, which owned Lancia, withdrew works support. The Stratos was replaced by the Fiat 131 Abarth. The absurdity of this decision is apparent in retrospect.

The air-cooled Porsche 911 market ran one of the more spectacular appreciation curves in modern collector car history. Cars that traded for twenty to thirty thousand dollars in the early 2010s reached six figures by 2018 and, in certain configurations, multiples of that by 2022. The 1973 Carrera RS 2.7 — the canonical desirability benchmark in the air-cooled segment — went from a strong-market price of around $400,000 to auction results exceeding $1.5 million for well-documented lightweight examples.

If the 250 GTO was Ferrari building a racing car with a license plate, the 250 GT Lusso was Ferrari building a road car with no ambiguity about its purpose. The Lusso — Gran Turismo Lusso, grand touring luxury — was a car for the owner who wanted to drive from Milan to Monaco in the morning and attend the casino in the evening, and who expected the machine doing this to be as beautiful as anything else in either city.

Carroll Shelby’s idea was simple in the way that most transformative ideas are simple: take a light British sports car body, remove its inadequate engine, and install an American V8 of sufficient dimensions to make the result deeply alarming. The AC Ace weighed approximately 2,100 pounds. The Ford 427 cubic inch side-oiler V8 produced around 485 horsepower. The arithmetic of this combination — a power-to-weight ratio that embarrassed Ferrari and Corvette simultaneously — produced a car that was genuinely dangerous to drive and genuinely faster than almost anything else on a straight road in 1965.