Today, a 1970 Hemi 'Cuda convertible can change hands for upwards of a million dollars. Back when it was first introduced, it was just a car, and Joe Oldham was just doing a job. His job wasn't to put the cars he tested on pedestals. Oldman's job was to beat the daylights out of them so we could know what they were really made of. As a test driver/photographer/journalist for such Magnum-Royal publications as Hi-Performance Cars, Supercars Annual, Rodder and Super/Stock, he provided the information that both brand-new muscle car buyers and car-crazy teenagers depended on. In Muscle Car Confidential, Oldham uses the original notes from the tests he conducted back in the day. Included are muscle cars from the 1962 421 Super Duty Catalina to the 1976 Trans Am 455 HO--twenty of them in all. Cars from every manufacturer are represented, in all their glory--or, on occasion, the lack thereof.
As an added bonus, the book boasts the original photography from every test Oldham conducted--not just the photos that were used in his magazine articles, but outtakes, as well. The story is told through both words and pictures, some that haven't been published in forty years and others that haven't been published at all. This book contains the true stories of the cars, not the watered-down, nostalgic, seen-through-rose-colored-glasses versions we find ourselves remembering today. By no means is the book mean-spirited, but it does present some cold, hard facts. For example, the 1968 Plymouth Road Runner was "just a car that didn't run very well." Despite its 426 Hemi. On the other hand, the 1970 Buick Gran Sport GSX was "the best handling muscle car we ever tested." Today, the articles Oldham wrote are used for research.
The performance numbers his tests derived are widely known. How he got those numbers, however, is not. Muscle Car Confidential is a tell-all, behind-the-scenes look at muscle cars when they were new; the truth behind the whole muscle car era as told by someone who lived it firsthand and whose articles helped create the myth that will continue to live into the future.