(DON’T FEAR) THE BEEPER

BACK IN THE DAY, AN UNMOLESTED MUSCLE CAR went against the spirit of the genre. Cheap hubcaps were discarded in favor of mag wheels, dashboards and parcel shelves were hacked up to accommodate new stereos and speakers, and all manner of aftermarket trickery was pressed into service under the hood, which may or may not have had cold-air holes cut into it. Out went the factory junk, and in came the goodies that made it one’s own.

Today, decades later, having a muscle car as a factory-fresh-appearing, period-correct artifact (frequently having undone half a century’s worth of mechanical misanthropy) makes a certain amount of historic — and financial — sense. It’s how they were sold off the lot, and how they were presented in the dealer brochures, road tests, and magazine ads of the period. Rare is the muscle machine that was simply maintained all along and driven like a car, rather than a two-ton suicide machine on a quest for dominance between the traffic lights.

With this in mind, we suggest that this Sunfire Yellow ’68