Ciprian Florea
7,287 ARTICLES
Personal motto:
"If you can make black marks on a straight from the time you turn out of a corner until the braking point of the next turn, then you have enough horsepower." - Mark Donohue
You'll never catch him drooling over the latest supercar but he could spend hours talking about why he loves 1940s windshield visors, Mopars, and Studebakers. Naturally, most of his stories are about barn finds and rare classics.
He can give you several reasons why speed and power are more about motorsport than silly street wandering, and Can-Am machinery tops his ridiculously fast all-time favorite car list. He claims he could die happy after a Rattlesnake Raceway ride in a Chaparral and a cup of coffee with Jim Hall on the other side of the table.
Before landing on these pages, Ciprian's work has been published on outlets like TopSpeed, AmericanMuscle, and ThisWeekInMotors.
Massive Mopar Hoard Discovered in Missouri, It's Packed With Rare HEMI Classics
19 Aug 2022, 15:59 UTC · By: Ciprian Florea / Seeing lots of classic cars from the same carmaker in one place isn't exactly unusual. It happens quite often if you tend to visit car shows or junkyards. But a big hoard of Mopars that includes a long list of rare HEMI vehicles is far from co...
1970 Chevrolet Chevelle Rides High on 24s, Hides Modern Surprise Under the Hood
19 Aug 2022, 09:37 UTC · By: Ciprian Florea / While not as iconic as the Corvette or the Camaro, the Chevelle is one of the great nameplates of the golden muscle car era. Mostly because it got a bunch of awesome V8 engines during the second generation (1968-1972). I'm obviously talking...
World's Only Dodge Durango Redeye Morphs Into Something Even More Ridiculous
18 Aug 2022, 13:51 UTC · By: Ciprian Florea / Back in June 2022, we learned that Dodge secretly built a Durango Hellcat Redeye. The shocking news came from drag racer Tom Bailey, who bought the one-off SUV from Dodge. Two months later and the world's only Durango Redeye is no more. No,...
World's Only Black 1970 Plymouth Superbird Comes Out of Hiding, Flaunts Unique Air Grabber
18 Aug 2022, 12:14 UTC · By: Ciprian Florea / Introduced in 1970, the Plymouth Superbird was pretty much the company's own take on the Dodge Charger Daytona, which rolled out in 1969. Both winged muscle cars were created as homologation specials for NASCAR racing and both are quite rare a...
1992 Chevrolet Majestic Nomad Is a Shameless Caprice With Bel Air Fins
17 Aug 2022, 20:23 UTC · By: Ciprian Florea / A 1990s Chevrolet Caprice with Tri-Five fins is usually the kind of stuff you expect to see in renderings, but I kid you not, this mashup is as real as they get. And I really don't know what to think about it. Yup, someone slapped a pair of...
1959 Chevrolet Corvette XP-87 Is the World's First Stingray, Sounds Furious
17 Aug 2022, 13:53 UTC · By: Ciprian Florea / Introduced in 1953 with a rather lackluster inline-six engine, the Chevrolet Corvette quickly evolved into a V8-powered beast and one of America's most legendary nameplates. And it also spawned a long list of spectacular concept cars. The XP-8...
Massive Junkyard Is Home to 10,000 Classics, Could Be the World's Largest
17 Aug 2022, 11:50 UTC · By: Ciprian Florea / If you heard of Old Car City USA in White, Georgia, you probably know that its owner describes it as the "world's largest known classic car junkyard." Home to about 4,500 vehicles, it is indeed huge, but it's not the largest. Be...
Creepy Funeral Home Has Been Abandoned for Years, Cadillac Hearses Stuck in the Garage
16 Aug 2022, 17:15 UTC · By: Ciprian Florea / When it comes to abandoned classic cars, most of them are rotting away in junkyards, while some are locked away in barns. Then we have vehicles forgotten on properties that have been abandoned for years. We usually document classics discovered in d...
1968 Shelby GT350 Spent Decades in Storage, Flaunts Rare Color and Original V8
16 Aug 2022, 15:00 UTC · By: Ciprian Florea / The first-generation Ford Mustang is a legendary classic on its own, but it spawned quite a few special versions that are highly desirable in 2022. The Shelby GT350 is one of them. While not as powerful as the Shelby GT500, the Mustang Cobra Jet...
1959 Chrysler Windsor Convertible Is a 1-of-1 Gem, but There's a Catch
15 Aug 2022, 19:59 UTC · By: Ciprian Florea / The Chrysler Corporation rolled out some of its finest vehicles in the 1950s. From the Chrysler 300 "letter series" to the Plymouth Fury and the Dodge Coronet, the big-fin Mopars of the mid-to-late-1950s will steal the show at any classic...
1957 Oldsmobile 88 Yard Find Is All-Original, Flexes Super-Rare V8 Banned by NASCAR
15 Aug 2022, 15:21 UTC · By: Ciprian Florea / While most enthusiasts argue that the muscle car era started with the Pontiac GTO in 1963, it actually began much earlier than that. And I'm not talking about the 1955 Chrysler C-300, also credited as an early muscle car. Nope, America's ...
Pair of 1965 Pontiac GTOs Come Out of the Barn, Get First Wash in 30 Years
15 Aug 2022, 12:18 UTC · By: Ciprian Florea / Seeing any classic car come out of long-term storage is a beautiful thing, but everything becomes that much better when the vehicle in question is a muscle car. Especially if it's an early Pontiac GTO. The first-generation GTO is far from r...
1969 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 Drag Races Dodge Challenger Demon, Doesn't Get Walked
15 Aug 2022, 09:54 UTC · By: Ciprian Florea / The golden muscle car era spawned a long list of incredibly fast and powerful performance vehicles. The 1969 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 was one of them. Come 2022 and the ZL1 is still around with a supercharged V8, but it's no longer the most powerf...
The Story of the 1963 Studebaker Sceptre, the Futuristic Concept You Never Knew Existed
14 Aug 2022, 14:04 UTC · By: Ciprian Florea / Introduced in 1962, the Studebaker Avanti is commonly known as the car that should have saved the company. But the sports car that broke 29 world speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats wasn't Studebaker's only attempt to create an out...
1957 Volkswagen Pickup Shorty Is Useless and Strangely Adorable
13 Aug 2022, 17:42 UTC · By: Ciprian Florea / Shortening the wheelbase may seem like a strange way to customize a car, but I've seen a few of them in the past. This 1971 Plymouth Duster is one of them, but there are quite a few Chevy Tri-Fives with extremely short wheelbases out there. Bu...
1941 Ford COE Spent 40 Years in the Desert, Flathead V8 Agrees To Run
13 Aug 2022, 13:00 UTC · By: Ciprian Florea / When it comes to Ford trucks, we usually think about the F-Series. And that's not surprising because this nameplate has been around for almost 75 years as of 2022. But Ford started making trucks much earlier than that. This 1941 cab over engin...
1971 Plymouth 'Cuda in Tunisian Tan Is a 1-of-1 Gem, Costs a Fortune
12 Aug 2022, 20:15 UTC · By: Ciprian Florea / Redesigned in 1969, the 1970 Plymouth Barracuda was a big hit with the muscle car crowd, moving almost 49,000 units. However, sales dropped dramatically in 1971, when only 16,492 examples left the assembly line. This number is still too high to pre...
1931 Chevrolet Abandoned for 70 Years Gets Second Chance, Engine Refuses to Die
12 Aug 2022, 13:26 UTC · By: Ciprian Florea / When it comes to late 1920s and early 1930s American classics of the affordable variety, we usually think about the Ford Model A (1928-1931) and Model B (1932-1934). For some reason, Chevrolet's answers to these cars are often forgotten. It...
1972 Dodge Challenger Flaunts Massive Scoop, Nasty Surprise Under the Hood
11 Aug 2022, 20:38 UTC · By: Ciprian Florea / Introduced for the 1970 model year, the first-generation Dodge Challenger was short-lived, leaving dealerships after only five years. But that was enough to establish itself as an iconic nameplate of the golden muscle car era. In fact, the Chall...
Abandoned Auto Shop Is Loaded With Rare Studebakers, Unobtainable Kaiser
11 Aug 2022, 15:46 UTC · By: Ciprian Florea / If I had a quarter for every GM, Ford, or Mopar guy out there, I'd probably be a millionaire. Because these are the car companies that shaped America and almost everyone loves their products. But while I could say I'm a Mopar guy myself, ...