Plymouth Cuda 1970 AAR in Moulin Rouge Paint

Plymouth built 2,724 AAR ‘Cudas inside a five-week window in spring 1970, purely to homologate the Trans-Am cars Dan Gurney’s team was campaigning. Each got a 340 Six Barrel with three Holley two-barrels, a functional fiberglass hood, side-exit exhaust ahead of the rear wheels, and staggered tire sizes that were an American production first. This one wears the high-impact Moulin Rouge paint. Read on for why it only lasted one year.

Plymouth built this car for five weeks and then never built another one. That was not a sales failure or a production problem, it was the plan from the beginning, because the entire reason the AAR ‘Cuda exists is that a racing rulebook demanded a minimum number of street cars before a team could put its version on a track. Everything strange about it traces back to that requirement: the fiberglass hood with a scoop that actually works, the exhaust that exits from the sides ahead of the rear tires, and tires that are not the same size front and rear. A Moulin Rouge example makes the whole thing even harder to ignore.

A Racing Rulebook Wrote the Spec Sheet

The SCCA Trans-Am series capped engine displacement at five liters, or 305 cubic inches, and required manufacturers to sell a minimum number of street versions before the corresponding race car could be homologated. Plymouth contracted Dan Gurney’s All American Racers operation to build and campaign its entries, which is where the AAR designation on the street car comes from. Chrysler was late to a series that Ford and Chevrolet had been contesting seriously for years, and the response was to buy in at the top by hiring one of the most respected constructors in American racing.

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The Race Engine Was Not the Showroom Engine

The engine in the race cars and the engine in the showroom cars shared a family but not a specification. Gurney’s team ran destroked versions of the 340 built down to the 305-cubic-inch limit, with heavily reworked heads and induction suited to road racing. Street buyers received the full 340 with three two-barrel carburetors, an arrangement that had nothing to do with the racing setup but everything to do with satisfying the homologation paperwork. It is a common pattern in the homologation era, where the road car exists to legalize a race car it does not actually resemble mechanically.

Six Barrel, Because Dodge Already Took Six Pack

The induction system consisted of three Holley two-barrel carburetors on an Edelbrock aluminum intake manifold, with the outer two held closed until the throttle opened far enough to bring them in. Dodge marketed the same hardware as the Six Pack, so Plymouth called its version the Six Barrel to preserve some brand separation between corporate siblings selling nearly identical cars. The factory rating was 290 horsepower at 5,000 rpm and 345 lb-ft at 3,400, figures that were widely considered conservative at the time and that most period testers assumed understated real output significantly.

The Hood Was Doing Real Work

The matte-black fiberglass hood was not a weight-saving styling exercise. Its scoop fed a dedicated air cleaner assembly sealed to the underside, drawing cold air directly into the Six Barrel setup rather than pulling heated air from the engine bay. Hood pins held it down because the panel is light enough to become a problem at speed. Details like the sealed air cleaner are the giveaway that a homologation car has been engineered rather than decorated, and they are also among the first parts to disappear from a car that has passed through several owners.

Exhaust That Exits in the Wrong Place

The exhaust routing is the detail that makes people walk around the car twice. Rather than exiting at the rear, the pipes turn outward and terminate just ahead of the rear wheels with chrome megaphone-style tips, a layout borrowed conceptually from racing practice and executed with more attention to sound than to science. The system runs through mufflers before it exits, so it was street legal, but the effect at full throttle is unmistakable and entirely deliberate. Nothing else on a Plymouth dealership floor in 1970 announced itself the same way.

The First American Production Car With Staggered Tires

To fit larger tires at the rear without cutting the body, Plymouth raised the rear ride height and fitted E60x15 tires up front with G60x15 at the back, making the AAR the first American production car sold with different tire sizes front and rear. That single decision produced the car’s distinctive nose-down stance, which owners have been fighting to preserve or correct ever since depending on their taste. It also complicated tire shopping for every subsequent owner, since matching period-correct staggered sizes is considerably harder than buying four of the same thing.

2,724 Cars in Five Weeks

Production totalled 2,724 cars, all of them assembled in a narrow window between March and April of 1970 that lasted roughly five weeks. The corresponding Dodge product, the Challenger T/A, accounted for 2,399 cars built to satisfy the same rule for the same series. Together they represent one of the shortest and most concentrated production runs of the entire muscle car era, and the reason both numbers are so precise is that the sanctioning body was counting. Building more would have served no purpose once the requirement was met.

Moulin Rouge Was Plymouth’s Name for It

The Moulin Rouge paint on this example belongs to Chrysler’s high-impact palette, a collection of deliberately outrageous colors introduced to catch the attention of younger buyers. Dodge sold the identical shade under the name Panther Pink, a naming split that produces confusion at shows to this day. The color was available for a very short period and on a small number of cars, which means a high-impact AAR carries a premium over the same car in a conventional color, and Moulin Rouge on a one-year-only homologation special is about as narrow an intersection as the era produced.

How the Racing Season Actually Went

The racing program that justified all of this lasted a single season. Gurney and Swede Savage campaigned the cars through 1970 against Mustangs, Javelins, and Camaros that had years of development behind them, and the results never matched the ambition. Chrysler withdrew from the series afterward, which meant the homologation requirement evaporated and the reason to build street versions went with it. The street car outlived the race program by decades, which is the usual and slightly ironic outcome of homologation specials across every series that has ever required them.

One Model Year, Permanently

Because the AAR existed for one model year, inside one five-week production window, every surviving car represents a specific and unrepeatable moment. There was no facelift, no second series, and no gradual dilution of the specification the way there was with almost every other performance model of the period. A racing rulebook decided how many people would eventually be able to own one, and it set that number at 2,724 before the first car was built. That is a strange way to run a car company, and it produced one of the more interesting machines of the era.

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