Long before YouTube reviews existed, Bud Lindemann was putting brand-new cars through braking and acceleration tests for a syndicated TV show called Car and Track. This clip preserves his period road test of a 1973 Plymouth Cuda 340, filmed the year insurance surcharges and emissions rules were already squeezing muscle cars out of their golden age. It is a genuine historical document as much as a car review. See how a Cuda 340 actually performed the year it was new.
Long before YouTube existed, before car reviews were something you could watch on demand, Bud Lindemann was strapping cameras to test tracks and putting brand new cars through their paces for a syndicated television show called Car and Track. This clip, a vintage road test of a 1973 Plymouth ‘Cuda 340, is one of hundreds Lindemann filmed during a run that lasted well over a decade, and it survives today only because someone bothered to preserve and re-upload it. Few people testing cars on camera today would think to include dry ice smoke and stopwatch overlays the way Lindemann’s crew did, and that stylistic quirk is part of the charm. What makes these old road tests worth watching decades later has everything to do with how differently cars were tested, and talked about, in period.
Who Was Bud Lindemann, and Why Does This Matter
Bud Lindemann hosted Car and Track from the 1960s into the 1970s, a syndicated program that gave American audiences their first real taste of standardized, on-camera vehicle testing, years before magazines like Motor Trend or Car and Driver had any real television competition. His format was simple and effective: put a new car through braking tests, acceleration runs, and handling courses, narrate the results plainly, and let viewers see the car actually perform rather than just read a spec sheet. For a 1973 ‘Cuda 340, that meant seeing exactly how a mid-tier muscle car handled real track conditions the year it was new.
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1973: The Year Muscle Cars Started Losing Ground
1973 sits at an awkward moment in muscle car history. Insurance surcharges on high-performance cars, tightening emissions regulations, and the looming oil crisis were already squeezing horsepower and options across the board, and the 340 small block, while still a genuinely strong performer, represented Plymouth‘s answer to a market that could no longer support the 440 and Hemi excess of a few years earlier. Watching a period road test of a 1973 ‘Cuda 340 is effectively watching the moment the genre started compromising, testing a car built at the exact hinge point between the muscle car era and what came after it.
What Vintage Road Tests Reveal That Modern Reviews Cannot
There is something uniquely valuable about watching a car get tested the year it was actually sold, with period-correct tires, fuel, and driving norms, rather than a modern restoration being evaluated against today’s expectations. Lindemann’s tests were not polished or produced the way automotive content is now, but that rawness is exactly what makes them useful historical documents. A viewer gets to see how contemporary drivers and journalists actually judged a ‘Cuda 340‘s braking distances, acceleration times, and general drivability against the other cars on the market in 1973, not how a modern enthusiast retroactively judges it with fifty years of hindsight.
Why This Footage Survives at All
Most of Lindemann’s original Car and Track episodes were never carefully archived by any studio, which means the versions circulating online today largely exist because individual collectors and fans took the time to digitize old broadcast tapes and re-upload them, often through basic tools like the old YouTube Video Editor rather than anything professional. That makes clips like this one small acts of preservation as much as entertainment, keeping a genuinely important piece of automotive media history accessible instead of letting it disappear along with the analog tape it was originally recorded on.
Every surviving clip adds one more piece to an otherwise thin public record of how these cars actually drove when they were new.
Watch the full video and share your thoughts below.
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I bought a 73 340 Cuda in October of 72 when the new 73 models came out. Paid $3300 for it. I loved that car. Like a dumbass I sold sold it 3 years later.
i was going to send you this. then i saw your name.
SWEET
Randy Tibbs, Eddie Pikulin