At the ripe old age of thirty-one (stop laughing), I grew up just as Detroit was waking up from the coma the EPA induced using a baseball bat in the early Seventies. 5.0 Mustangs and IROC Camaros were passable, the Grand National Buicks were something to behold, and the turbo Dodges proved that if done right, front-wheel-drive performance could work out. The late Eighties seemed to be going right…then a lot of wrong hit. GM killed off the RWD G-bodies and gave us the W-platform, pissing off a lot of customers who didn’t want Luminas and underpowered Regals. The most sociopathic FWD Dodges didn’t make it much past 1989 and were certainly gone (except the Daytona, which held on through 1993, and Ford had seriously considered killing off the Mustang, which was averted when someone started reading the incoming hate mail from the fans.

If I were to pin the year I started paying attention to the details of the cars past “it goes fast and looks good”, that year is ’93. The F-twins got 275 horsepower and people’s jaws dropped. This Firebird could hit nearly 167mph top speed! Things were looking up! Twenty one years later it’s kind of laughable, but when a 225hp Mustang was it’s nearest competitor, you sensed that someone was rekindling a fire to start getting torches ready. Then the numbers started inching up and the next thing I remember, we had the Impala SS, Mustang Cobra and the Ford Lightning.

Image: Car and Driver

In the middle of this early revival madness, there were in-house tuners that were doing some insane things in the name of horsepower. John Coletti’s Boss Mustang was tooling around packing a legit Boss ‘9 under the hood, but GM had, by about 1996 if my memory is correct, one hell of a collection that was known as the Toy Box. There was the ZL1 Camaro that was packing at least 572ci of GM big-block under the hood, an Impala with a 572 and another one with a hot LT1 and six speed swap, a rear-drive V8 converted 1995 Monte Carlo, a Cavalier Z24 with a rally setup to it, and some wild-ass trucks with big blocks and Bravada all-wheel-drive systems…I remember the names Coolside and Wildside for sure. Dodge didn’t have too much performance-wise, but they did build the T-Rex 6×6 Ram with a tweaked V-10 in it and sent a Stratus to North American Touring Car where it was a serious competitor.

Nowadays? Well, Dodge is skipping the show part and is going full-on clinical with the Hellcat series, but they have had to cut the price on the Viper to move them. Ford, lately, is trying to be the mature one out of the group and except for the Raptor, has been really restrained. Even if you consider the Ford GT, they have only done what’s needed, not gone wild. For the wild side, they’ve farmed that out to Shelby American. And GM? GM has done some stunning concepts (see: Cadillac Ciel and Elmiraj), but the Toy Box end of it seems dead, especially after 2008 when GM sent a lot of the cars they had kept to the auction block, including unregisterable concept cars, like the “Ferreta” V8 FWD Beretta with a mystery V8 under the hood.

I might be a bit swayed, but is it too much that I want to see more underground builds from the factory again? Someone show me a Taurus with twin 88mm’s hidden under that hood, make it lively. Do something interesting with a new Chevy Cruze that would make the car more attractive and powerful. Hell, let’s see a factory take on a Charger coupe, if but to shut up the “no four-door” crowd. Could it be done? Should it be done? What do you think? With what’s currently available, what can be done to make not just the halo cars, but all of the cars a manufacturer has interesting like they did twenty years ago?