Awesome Plum Crazy Purple 1970 Dodge Challenger 426 Hemi Convertible

Only twelve people ever ordered a 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T with a 426 Hemi and a convertible top — and just five came with a manual transmission, like this Plum Crazy Purple example from the Brothers Collection. The factory fender tag tells the whole story, down to the exact rear gear ratio and interior trim code. See how V8TV verifies a claim this rare, one code at a time.

Out of a world population north of 3.8 billion in 1970, exactly twelve people walked into a Dodge dealership and ordered this specific combination — a 426 Hemi under the hood of a Challenger convertible, with a manual gearbox and the top folded down. Nine of those twelve cars stayed in the United States. Only five, including this one, came with a stick shift instead of an automatic. The rest of the story lives on a small steel tag bolted to the fender, and once you know how to read it, this car’s entire life gets a lot less mysterious.

The Fender Tag That Tells No Lies

Every factory-built Mopar from this era left the assembly line with a steel Fender tag documenting its exact original specification, a document that’s become essential for verifying whether a car’s claimed rarity actually holds up. On this Challenger, the tag reads R-code 426 Hemi, D21 heavy-duty four-speed gearbox, A33 Dana 60 rear end with 3.54 locking gears, N42 chrome-tipped dual exhaust, B51 power brakes, and 15×7 Rally wheels — a combination that leaves no ambiguity about what this car was built to do from the day it left the factory.

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Why the Challenger Existed in the First Place

Dodge rushed the Challenger to market for 1970 specifically to compete against the Mercury Cougar and, by extension, the entire personal pony car segment defined by the Mustang and Camaro’s long-hood, short-deck proportions. Built on an extended version of the Barracuda’s E-body platform, the Challenger gave Dodge a genuinely distinct product rather than a badge-engineered Barracuda, with its own sculpted bodyside crease, sportier grille, and taillight design that separated it visually from its Plymouth sibling despite the shared mechanical bones underneath.

The Engine Twelve People Actually Ordered

The 426 Hemi under this Challenger’s hood used dual four-barrel carburetors to produce a factory-rated 425 horsepower, though real-world output was widely understood at the time to run considerably higher than Chrysler’s conservative advertised number. Paired with the four-speed manual and 3.54 gears documented on the fender tag, this specific combination represented the single most serious performance package Dodge offered on the Challenger platform in 1970 — a genuinely uncompromising drag-strip-capable machine wearing a convertible top almost as an afterthought.

Why So Few Buyers Said Yes

The Hemi’s steep price premium over the more common 440 Magnum likely explains most of the gap between Challenger sales overall and Hemi convertible orders specifically — Dodge’s engineers accommodated the big engine, but convincing buyers to pay for it, on top of the convertible body style’s own added cost, proved to be a much harder sell. Younger buyers targeted by the Scat Pack marketing push, the video notes, may simply have found the 440 a more affordable path to nearly the same reputation.

An Interior Built to Match the Engine

Inside, the fender tag documents H6X6 high-back black bucket seats, an A62 Rally instrument cluster with a 150-mph speedometer, tachometer, and clock, plus an R1 Music Master AM radio — a genuinely purposeful cabin rather than a stripped-down drag special. The P37 power convertible top and Hurst chrome shifter, mounted without a center console, round out a cabin built around a driver who wanted both serious performance and a reasonably comfortable place to enjoy it from.

The Color That Announces Everything

Even a viewer with zero knowledge of the fender tag’s contents would clock this car’s significance instantly: Plum Crazy Purple paint with a bold white stripe and a bulging hood carrying Hemi badging, a combination Dodge specifically marketed toward buyers who wanted their car’s performance advertised before the engine ever turned over. It’s one of the era’s most recognizable High Impact colors, and on a convertible this rare, it does exactly what Chrysler’s marketing team intended five decades ago.

Don Garlits’ Endorsement

Legendary drag racer Big Daddy Don Garlits reviewed the 1970 Challenger R/T Hemi for a period Scat Pack brochure and reportedly called it triple tough, urging Dodge to build and sell a million of them. Garlits’ endorsement carried real weight in an era when drag racing legitimacy translated directly into showroom credibility, even though, as this car’s rarity proves, Dodge came nowhere close to selling anywhere near that volume of Hemi-powered Challengers, convertible or otherwise.

From the Brothers Collection to Muscle Car of the Week

This particular example comes from what V8TV identifies as the Brothers Collection, featured as episode 207 of the channel’s ongoing Muscle Car of the Week series — a format built specifically around cars with documented, verifiable rarity rather than simply impressive specs. For a car with only twelve Hemi convertibles built worldwide, that kind of verification matters more than usual, and the fender tag walkthrough gives viewers exactly the tools they’d need to confirm the claim themselves.

Reading a Fender Tag Like a Detective

For buyers evaluating any claimed rare Mopar, the fender tag remains the single most reliable piece of physical evidence available, cross-referenced against broadcast sheets, VIN codes, and factory build records to confirm a car wasn’t simply badged or cloned after the fact to inflate its value. On a car this rare — one of just twelve Hemi convertibles built — that verification process isn’t optional, and V8TV’s decision to walk through the tag’s individual codes on camera gives viewers the exact tools they’d need to perform that same verification themselves, rather than simply asking them to trust the channel’s word for it.

What Happened to the Other Eleven

Of the twelve Hemi convertibles Dodge built for 1970, surviving examples are tracked closely by Mopar registries and specialist appraisers, with several documented losses over the decades to accidents, neglect, or simple attrition common to any fifty-plus-year-old car. That scarcity means every surviving, well-documented example — including this Plum Crazy Purple car from the Brothers Collection — carries added weight simply by existing in verifiable, driveable condition today. For serious Mopar collectors, tracking which of the original twelve remain accounted for has become its own quiet pursuit, one this fender-tag walkthrough contributes directly to by putting another verified example on the record.

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