1969 Plymouth Road Runner For Sale

This 1969 Plymouth Road Runner spent its early life as ‘Agent Orange,’ a Detroit-area drag car famous for popping wheelies at Milan Dragway. A decade-long rotisserie restoration and a NASCAR-built 500-cubic-inch six-pack engine later, it’s now a street-legal machine wearing its drag strip pedigree openly. See what a numbers-matching build sheet and a genuine quarter-mile history look like on the same car.

Somewhere along Detroit’s drag strips in the early 1970s, a Plymouth Road Runner earned itself a nickname before it ever earned a for-sale sign. Locals at Milan Dragway and other area strips knew it as ‘Agent Orange,’ famous for standing its front wheels off the pavement on nearly every pass down the quarter mile. Decades later, a stroked 500-cubic-inch engine sits where the original 440 once lived, built by a friend with NASCAR credentials, and the car that used to live exclusively at the strip now carries a title and rolls on the street. What survives from its wheelie-popping past, and what got rebuilt from scratch to get it there, is where this one gets interesting.

The Car Called Agent Orange

Before it was a street-legal Road Runner with a VIN and a for-sale listing, this car had a reputation earned entirely at the drag strip. Built into a dedicated drag car and campaigned locally around Detroit, it picked up the nickname Agent Orange for two reasons: its bright orange paint, and a habit of launching hard enough to lift its front wheels clean off the ground on nearly every run at Milan Dragway and other regional strips. A car doesn’t earn a nickname like that by being driven gently, and everything about its later rebuild suggests the people who worked on it understood exactly what made it famous in the first place.

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From Cage to Street Legal

About a decade before this video was filmed, a previous owner took on the job of converting a dedicated drag car back into something that could be registered and driven on public roads. That meant removing the roll cage that had protected earlier drivers at the strip and performing a full rotisserie restoration — pulling the body completely off the frame to address every inch of it — rather than a quick cosmetic freshening. The result kept the car’s drag-racing bones intact while making it legal and comfortable enough to drive to a show, a combination that’s harder to pull off convincingly than either a pure track car or a pure street cruiser on its own.

A NASCAR-Built 500 Cubic Inches

The 440 that originally powered this Road Runner is long gone, replaced by a 500-cubic-inch stroker build assembled by a friend of the previous owner who worked in NASCAR. Topped with a factory-style Six Pack setup — three two-barrel Holley carburetors feeding an Edelbrock intake and aluminum heads — the engine is claimed by the seller to make around 700 horsepower, a number that lines up with what a well-built 500-inch big block on a six-barrel induction system can realistically produce. It’s the kind of engine swap that keeps the visual language of a factory six-pack Mopar while quietly displacing far more air than anything Chrysler ever put in a Road Runner from the factory.

Numbers That Matter Under the Hood

Even with a non-original engine now in place, the car’s paperwork trail runs deep. The original 440 block was cast on August 29, 1967, intended for the 1968 model year, carrying casting number 2536430 that Chrysler used across 440s built between 1966 and 1972. The four-speed A-833 manual transmission dates to 1969, matching the car’s model year, and rides behind a Dana 60 rear end fitted with a Sure-Grip limited-slip differential and 3.23 gears — a durable combination chosen for cars expected to see real power. Documentation like casting numbers and build dates doesn’t just satisfy curiosity; it’s how buyers confirm a heavily modified car still has legitimate period-correct bones underneath the changes. It also gives a prospective buyer something concrete to cross-reference against the fender tag and broadcast sheet, if either has survived, rather than relying entirely on the seller’s word about what the car used to be.

Built to Stop What It Starts

Getting a car to launch hard enough to pop wheelies is one problem; stopping it afterward is another, and this Road Runner’s braking setup reflects priorities from an era when straight-line speed mattered more than comfort. Manual front disc and rear drum brakes, manual steering, and a chrome front sway bar for added stability keep the car firmly in the performance camp rather than the boulevard-cruiser one. New rear air shocks help manage weight transfer under hard acceleration, a detail drag racers have relied on for decades to plant the rear tires the instant the throttle goes down, exactly the kind of setup a car nicknamed for its wheelies would need to keep performing that trick reliably.

Wheels Breaking Loose on the Test Drive

One viewer commenting on the video admitted to laughing at the exact same moment the seller did when the rear wheels broke loose during a test drive — a moment that makes a lot more sense once you see what’s mounted underneath. Cragar wheels wrapped in Hoosier drag radials measuring 31×16.50×15 in the rear are built for maximum grip off the line at a drag strip, not necessarily for predictable behavior on a public road under a heavy right foot. Tires that size, on a car making an estimated 700 horsepower through a Dana 60 with 3.23 gears, are going to find their limit quickly if the driver isn’t paying close attention to how much throttle they’re feeding it. It’s a small preview of the same behavior that made the car famous at the strip in the first place — the difference between a controlled wheelie on a prepped drag surface and an unplanned one on public asphalt is mostly a matter of traction and timing.

An A12-Adjacent Icon

In the comments, longtime Mopar fans single out the factory A12 package — Plymouth’s 1969 option code for 440 Six Barrel Road Runners and Super Bees — as their favorite muscle car configuration of all time, and it’s easy to see why this particular Road Runner draws the same reaction. While this car isn’t a factory-documented A12, since its six-pack big block is a later rebuild rather than an original factory installation, it wears the same three-carburetor, fiberglass-hood look that made the A12 cars legendary, and it backs that look up with a genuinely built engine rather than just the visual cues. For fans of that era, it’s close enough to the real thing to draw exactly the same crowd. That’s part of what makes a car like this appealing to buyers who love the A12 look but can’t stomach A12 auction prices: a genuinely built six-pack big block, at a fraction of what a documented factory original would cost.

Catch the full video above and leave your thoughts below.

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