Hellcat Challenger’s Daddy ?? 440 6 Pack Challenger vs Hemi Road Runner Drag Video – Road Test TV

A rare 425-horsepower 426 Hemi Road Runner — 1 of just 287 built in 1970 — takes on a 440 Six Pack Challenger in a quarter-mile grudge match that Mopar fans still can’t agree on decades later. Both cars sold for around $4,000 new and are now worth 20 to 40 times that. Watch to see which factory legend crosses the line first.

Before Dodge ever built a Hellcat, the company was already settling arguments about which of its own muscle cars deserved bragging rights — and this quarter-mile matchup is one of the purest examples of that internal rivalry ever caught on film. Two of the rarest, most expensive-to-recreate engine packages Chrysler ever offered line up against each other, one relying on triple carburetors and one on Mopar’s most feared engine of all, and the gap between their factory horsepower ratings tells only part of the story.

425 Horsepower on Paper

The 1970 Plymouth Road Runner in this race carries the 426 Hemi, factory-rated at 425 horsepower thanks to a pair of four-barrel carburetors feeding its legendary hemispherical combustion chambers — a rating widely understood even at the time to be conservative, insurance-industry politics more than an honest dyno number. Only 152 Road Runners were built with the 426 Hemi in 1970 — 75 hardtops, 74 pillared coupes, and three convertibles — making this one of the rarest muscle car combinations Plymouth ever offered, and rarer than most fans probably realize.

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390 Horsepower and Three Carburetors

Its opponent, a 1970 Dodge Challenger, runs the 440 Six Pack — a trio of two-barrel carburetors stacked atop a 440-cubic-inch big block, officially rated at 390 horsepower. Chrysler built roughly 2,035 of these Six Pack Challengers that year, a number that, while still low by modern standards, made it a meaningfully more attainable performance option than the Hemi for period buyers chasing serious quarter-mile numbers without the Hemi’s price premium or reputation for finicky street manners.

From $4,000 New to a Six-Figure Investment

Both cars carried roughly similar sticker prices when new — somewhere around $4,000, according to the video’s own description — a figure that puts their current market values into staggering perspective. Values on genuine Hemi Road Runners and 440 Six Pack Challengers from this era have climbed to 20 to 40 times their original cost, turning what were once simply quick, affordable muscle cars into some of the most closely watched collector investments in the entire Mopar market.

A Rivalry the Comments Can’t Settle

Even decades later, viewers can’t pick a side. “I love both of these cars, think I’d rather have the Challenger. No wait, the Roadrunner. No wait,” one commenter wrote, capturing the exact indecision this matchup is designed to provoke. It’s a rivalry with no clean resolution, because both cars represent Chrysler’s engineering department pursuing the same goal — maximum quarter-mile performance — through genuinely different mechanical philosophies.

Living the Six-Pack Dream at 19

One comment added real generational weight to the matchup: “Growing up a close friend had a 1970 RT Challenger with a 440 Six-Pack, OMG that was an awesome car. To be 19 years old in 1980 driving a 440 Six-Pack Challenger, so sad that today’s youth will never experience that joy.” It’s a reminder that cars like this weren’t always locked away as investments — for a stretch of the late 1970s and early 1980s, they were simply cheap, fast, secondhand muscle cars available to young drivers.

Steep Gears and Serious Traction

Another comment zeroed in on the driveline setups likely underneath both cars: “Got damn 4.10s and 4.30s rear ends, I am in heaven.” Steep rear gear ratios like these sacrifice top-end highway cruising in exchange for the kind of hard, immediate launch that both a Hemi and a 440 Six Pack need to put their torque down efficiently — a tradeoff period muscle car buyers made willingly in pursuit of quarter-mile bragging rights.

Why Road Test TV Keeps Revisiting This Rivalry

This matchup fits squarely into the kind of programming Road Test TV has built a following on: straightforward, no-frills quarter-mile races between genuinely significant muscle cars, letting the cars and their history do the talking rather than leaning on flashy production. For a rivalry this foundational to Mopar’s muscle car legacy, that simple format is exactly what makes the result worth watching more than fifty years after both cars first left the factory floor.

Insurance Politics and the Real Horsepower Story

The 425-horsepower rating on the 426 Hemi is widely regarded by historians as deliberately conservative — Chrysler and its rivals routinely underrated their most powerful engines during the muscle car era specifically to keep insurance premiums manageable for buyers. Independent dyno testing and period magazine estimates have long suggested the real output of a well-tuned Street Hemi was meaningfully higher than the factory number suggested, a detail that only adds to the mystique surrounding an engine that was already feared on the street and dominant at the strip even by its official numbers.

Two Icons, One Shared Design Philosophy

Despite their different carburetor setups, both the Hemi Road Runner and the 440 Six Pack Challenger were built around the same Chrysler engineering philosophy of the late 1960s: take the biggest, most powerful engine available, wrap it in the lightest practical body, and let raw cubic inches do the rest. That shared DNA is exactly why this matchup remains one of the most frequently revisited internal rivalries in Mopar history — two different roads to the same destination, built by the same company, for buyers chasing the exact same quarter-mile bragging rights.

Collecting in an Era of Rising Mopar Values

Collector demand for both of these platforms has only intensified as the pool of surviving, unmolested examples continues to shrink. Auction houses that specialize in muscle cars now treat documented Hemi Road Runners and Six Pack Challengers as blue-chip investments, with provenance research, broadcast sheets, and fender tag verification becoming standard practice before a serious sale. For buyers priced out of that market entirely, footage like this remains one of the few ways left to experience what these cars were actually built to do.

Why This Rivalry Still Defines Mopar Fandom

Ask a hundred Mopar fans which car they’d rather own and expect close to a fifty-fifty split, with reasoning ranging from the Hemi’s near-mythical status to the Six Pack Challenger’s slightly more attainable rarity and lower long-term maintenance demands. That inability to reach consensus, decades after both cars left the factory, is precisely what keeps this rivalry alive at car shows, in forum threads, and in comment sections under videos exactly like this one.

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2 Comments

David Hayes September 24, 2017

Hasn’t got a chance against a hellcat. My 507 hp Scatpack probably could it. Wonderful nostalgia mopar car tho. It’s mopar or nocar for me
Mike Freimann September 24, 2017

11 second pass it awesome. Just as fast as today’s cars with some exceptions

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