Some people just don’t get it, says Drew Alcazar, the CEO and co-owner of the Russo and Steele auction company. Some people just don’t see the appeal of American muscle cars. "If you showed up in Tokyo or Beijing or Dubai with a Roadrunner, people there would say, "What the heck is that?’ " says Alcazar, whose company specializes in muscle car sales. "They’d look at you as if you had just fallen off another planet.

"There is an ethnocentric, isolationist connection between Americans and muscle cars," continues Alcazar. "They are just ingrained into our culture, and not just for the generation that owned the first ones and the generation that followed, but also for the current generation. With remakes of Starsky & Hutch and The Dukes of Hazzard and with the efforts of American car manufacturers to market the newest muscle cars, they also have been infused into our current pop culture."

That’s where the carmakers here come in. They offer vehicles that look like the original muscle cars, but they have rebuilt and reengineered them to meet the expectations of a generation of American auto enthusiasts who could instead be driving modern, foreign-made supercars.

Classic Automotive Restoration Specialists (CARS)
CARS began, in 1999 in Belews Creek, N.C., as a restoration and repair company. It will fix or give a face-lift to just about any kind of car: American and foreign classics and antiques and American muscle cars, hot rods, and trucks—from Chevy Camaros to Roll-Royce Phantoms. In 2004, it began offering turnkey cars, specifically 1969 Camaros, either custom orders or what it refers to as continuations of two limited-edition 1969 Camaros, the Yenko (left) and the COPO (above). Both vehicles are built to order with all-new components.

The 1969 Camaro Continuation Series is called that because, CARS’s literature explains, the company has picked up production where GM left off in 1969, after it had built 201Yenkos and 69 COPOs. For both vehicles, CARS offers the same options and colors that were available in 1969.

Like the original Yenkos, the CARS continuation Yenko ($140,000) is powered by an iron 427 engine, a new one built by GM Performance Parts. And it has a new 4-speed transmission. The Yenko Camaro is named for Don Yenko, an auto dealer in Pennsylvania who, when Camaros debuted in 1967, replaced their smaller engines with Corvette 427 power plants and sold as many as 50 of them. Because of the popularity of his conversion editions, by 1969 Yenko was able to order Camaros from GM with factory-installed 427 engines. Yenko Camaros thus are considered the first GM COPO—Central Office Production Order—cars.

Later in 1969, Fred Gibb, a Chevrolet dealer in Illinois, requested that GM produce the Camaro with the ZL-1 all-aluminum 427 engine. That car became COPO 9560. CARS offers COPO 9560 (for $175,000) or COPO 9561 ($140,000), which is equipped with an iron 427 engine similar to the Yenko’s.

Roadster Shop
The Roadster Shop, located in Mundelein, Ill., began as a chassis manufacturer and then began building turnkey custom hotrods about 10 years ago. Along the way, the company also starting doing muscle car restorations, transforming the vehicles into performance-based pro-touring cars. The first of these cars was the 1966 Chevrolet Chevelle shown above.

The Chevelle, which has been tested and tuned for optimal suspension performance, has placed among the top-three finishers in every auto cross event that it has entered. The car, which had 40,000 original miles, still has all of its original sheet metal panels and trim. In testing conducted by Super Chevy magazine, the Chevelle’s Roadster Shop-built chassis enabled it to record the fastest slalom time ever. It averaged nearly 50 mph on the snakelike course, and on the skid pad, it stopped from a speed of 60 mph after traveling only 117 feet.

Earlier this year, the 1962 Corvette shown below was selected as the Street Machine of the Year at the 2009 Goodguys PPG Nationals in Columbus, Ohio. The Roadster Shop discarded most of the car’s original parts and replaced them with an aluminum front end, carbon fiber and billet trim, red leather seats, and an aluminum dash. The car’s engine produces a potent 618 hp.

XV Motorsports
XV stands for Xtreme Velocity, and it’s a reference to the performance levels of the classic Mopar muscle cars—’Cudas, Challengers, and Chargers—that this Irvington, N.J., company re-creates. XV will convert your existing classic Plymouth or Dodge into an XV supercar using its state-of-the art components and engineering, or you can start from scratch by choosing a muscle car shell from XV’s vast inventory. In addition to doing the body and paintwork on the cars, EX installs its own 5.7-liter or 6.1-liter HEMI engines, race-quality suspensions, and disk brake systems that are suited to vehicles with so much horsepower.

The 1971 XV Plymouth ’Cuda convertible shown here was given a 600 hp XV 6.1-liter HEMI. Because the owner wanted to race the car occasionally, while still being able to drive it comfortably on the streets, XV equipped it with a removable, four-point roll bar with racing harnesses. To complement the custom red exterior paint, XV did the dash, dash pad, column, carpet, and kick panels in burgundy. The seats and the rest of the interior are white leather.

Fesler Built
Fesler Built restores muscle cars and re-creates custom versions of them in a 12,000-square-foot facility in Scottsdale, Ariz. The company was formed a decade ago by Chris and Carrie Fesler, a married couple who, back in the mid-1990s, began their car-oriented careers by producing editorial packages for automotive magazines. They later creatied marketing campaigns for car-industry companies that included the Feslers’ building a number of one-of-a-kind show cars.

The Feslers’ show car background is apparent in the 1969 Camaro shown below (right). The car’s nickname, Draco, Latin for dragon, is perhaps a reference to its fire-breathing, GM-sourced 572-cubic-inch engine. Whatever its derivation, the name certainly suits the car’s menacing appearance, which is enhanced by 19-inch wheels with black centers. Draco’s interior features leather seats and a high-end sound system.
The 1970 Chevelle SS convertible shown below (left) was a complete rebuild, with all-new panels and other parts. It is powered by a GM-sourced, fuel-injected 454 engine. The rebuild took less than a year.

Earlier this year, Fesler teamed with Jon Moss, the former director of GM’s specialty vehicles division, to offer the Fesler Moss Camaro, an upgrade package for the 2010 Camaro that equips it with, among other features, a 6.2-liter V-8 and supercharger that produces 530 hp.