The Oldsmobile Rocket 88 was produced from 1949 till 1999, it’s widely credited with launching Oldsmobile out of it’s staid reputation in the 1940s into a new, NASCAR dominating behemoth and the 88 is often pointed to as the pre-cursor to the muscle cars that began appearing in the 1960s.
The combination of a light-weight body and a powerful V8 gave the Rocket 88 a significant advantage on the racetrack and led to the Oldsmobile winning the majority of NASCAR races in 1949, 1950 and 1951.
The surviving Rocket 88s fetch a pretty penny at auction nowadays and the rocket shaped badges on the cars have a community of collectors spanning the globe.
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Articles that Ben has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
