426 Hemi Cuda vs 426 Hemi Coronet R/T – 1/4 mile drag race video – Road Test TV

A 1970 Hemi Cuda, one of just 652 built with the 426 that year, lines up against an even rarer 1967 Hemi Coronet R/T, one of the earliest street-legal Hemi cars Dodge ever sold. Both cars share the same legendary Elephant engine, which means this is less a brand rivalry than a family argument about which chassis and gearing made better use of it. Viewers in the comments have already nicknamed both cars the asphalt elephants. Watch the run and see which body style actually won the argument.

Every family has a rivalry that never really ends, the kind where two relatives share the same blood but can not agree on anything else. Put the same 426 cubic inch engine into two completely different Chrysler bodies, three model years apart, and you get exactly that kind of rivalry on asphalt instead of at Thanksgiving dinner. One of these cars is the icon everyone recognizes; the other is the scrappy underdog most casual fans forget Chrysler ever built with the same legendary powerplant. Only one of them crosses the line first, and the reason why has less to do with the engine than with what is bolted around it.

Same Engine, Different Family Tree

Both cars in this race share the single most famous engine Chrysler ever built: the 426 Hemi, nicknamed the Elephant for its sheer physical size and the way it stomped on everything else at the drag strip through the late 1960s and early 1970s. The dual four-barrel carburetor setup, hemispherical combustion chambers, and a factory rating of 425 horsepower that everyone in the muscle car world still treats as conservative made the Hemi the engine every other manufacturer measured itself against. What makes this particular pairing interesting is that both cars wearing it are genuinely rare, not just rare-sounding.

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The Rarity Behind Both Cars

The newer of the two, a 1970 Plymouth Hemi Cuda, is one of only 652 built that model year with the 426 under its shaker hood – a real number, but one that still makes it one of the more attainable Hemi cars from that era relative to some of its siblings. Its opponent, a 1967 Dodge Coronet R/T built with the Hemi option, is scarcer still – Chrysler built just 283 R/T Hemi hardtops that entire model year, 121 with the four-speed and 162 with the automatic, making it one of the rarest street Hemis Dodge ever put a warranty behind. Neither car is a common sight even at major Mopar shows.

Where the Street Hemi Era Actually Began

The Coronet R/T carries a piece of Hemi history that often gets overshadowed by the more famous cars that followed it. 1966 and 1967 were the first two model years Chrysler offered the street Hemi to retail customers at all, after years of the engine existing almost exclusively as a race-only option. That makes this Coronet one of the earliest street-legal Hemi cars Dodge ever sold, predating the Charger R/T’s most famous Hemi years and giving it a claim to being where the whole street-Hemi era actually began.

The Owner Behind the Cuda

One commenter on the video identified the Cuda’s owner by name, noting that Bob lives right down the street and is, in their words, a great guy – a small detail, but one that speaks to how tightly-knit the community around cars like these actually is. These are not investment pieces locked away by anonymous collectors; they are owned, maintained, and raced by people the local car community knows personally, which is part of why channels like this one keep finding willing participants for races that put six-figure cars at real risk on the strip.

No Losers When Both Cars Wear a Hemi

Viewers in the comments coined their own nickname for this matchup, calling both cars asphalt elephants side by side and noting that with two genuine Hemis on the line, nobody watching could really call it a loss either way. That sentiment runs through nearly every comment on the video: this is not a grudge match between rival brands where one side gets to gloat, since both cars wear the same three-letter badge under the hood. The only real debate is which body style and gearing combination made better use of the shared engine.

Why Gearing Decided This One

Gearing and chassis weight end up mattering more than most viewers expect once two examples of the same engine line up against each other. The Coronet’s mid-size B-body platform and the Cuda’s smaller E-body were engineered on different wheelbases with different rear-end ratios available from the factory, and small differences in final drive gearing can shift a race by several tenths of a second even when the engines under the hood are functionally identical. That is exactly the kind of detail that separates a close Hemi-versus-Hemi race from a foregone conclusion.

One Engine, an Entire Performance Lineup

The broader Hemi story these two cars represent is one of Chrysler doubling down on a single engine across nearly its entire performance lineup for the better part of a decade. Coronets, Chargers, Cudas, Road Runners, GTXs, and Super Bees all offered the 426 Hemi as an option at some point, turning what began as a NASCAR-homologation race engine into the connective thread running through the entire late-1960s Mopar performance catalog. Races like this one are really a chance to see two branches of that same family tree tested against each other directly.

What These Cars Are Worth Today

Both of these cars are worth serious money today, with clean, numbers-matching Hemi Coronets and Hemi Cudas both routinely commanding six-figure prices at major auctions, and early Hemi R/T Coronets in particular have become harder to find as more of them have been discovered, restored, and pulled permanently out of circulation into private collections. Every time a channel like this one gets an owner willing to actually run one down the quarter mile instead of trailering it to a static show, it is capturing something that is going to get rarer to see with each passing year.

The Real Reason to Watch This One

What makes this specific race worth watching is not picking a winner between two unrelated brands, it is watching the same legendary engine prove itself twice, in two different bodies, more than fifty years after Chrysler built either car. The Elephant does not care which shell it is wearing. Watch the run, listen to the notes both engines pull through the traps, and decide for yourself which chassis actually made better use of the shared powerplant.

See the full video above and join the conversation in the comments.

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