Posts Tagged: 1969 Dodge Charger
A vintage road test puts a 1969 Dodge Charger 500 — Dodge’s NASCAR homologation special, built to fix the standard Charger’s high-speed aerodynamics — through its paces with the 426 Hemi under the hood. Announcer Bud Lindeman narrates in period broadcast style, and the comments are full of viewers’ own Hemi street stories. Watch to hear the line that’s still quoted decades later.
An orange Dodge Charger R/T dressed in unmistakable General Lee livery does something the Dukes of Hazzard rarely showed on screen — sliding sideways through a corner instead of flying over a jump. Shot on a brand-new camcorder as the creator’s first upload, the clip pairs a genuine R/T’s engine note with real driver involvement. Watch a TV icon prove it’s more than just a stunt car.
Ask ten muscle car fans to name the greatest of all time and you will get eleven answers and one argument. A reader poll settled it once, and the results are stranger than you would expect: the car that finished first was never designed to race, and the car with the highest horsepower rating finished second. Read on for the full countdown and the numbers behind each placing.
Some builds put two things together that were never supposed to meet. Cleveland Power and Performance took a 1969 Dodge Charger body, a shape recognizable at fifty yards, and married it to a modern supercharged chassis that makes more than twice the horsepower the original engineers ever contemplated. Read on to find out why they swapped the body onto the frame instead of the engine into the car.
Deep inside a Wisconsin barn, under a stripe of bird droppings and a small mountain of collapsed hay, sat two of Mopar’s rarest aero warriors: a 1969 Dodge Charger 500 and a 1970 Plymouth Superbird, untouched for the better part of thirty years. Their owner found each one through a different stroke of luck, a vague classified ad and a tip from a wing car club, decades before either car ever left the barn. Read on to find out how both cars ended up parked together, and why one of them still wears its original barn hay to car shows.
Dodge built the 1969 Charger Daytona to beat Ford on NASCAR’s fastest superspeedways after six straight years of losing the manufacturers’ championship. An 18-inch nose cone tested in an aircraft wind tunnel and a towering rear wing turned a struggling full-size Charger into the first stock car to break 200 miles per hour. It worked so well that NASCAR rewrote its own rules just to slow it down. Read on for how a two-season career made this the most collectible Mopar most casual fans still can’t quite place.
One jump – sixteen feet high, eighty-two feet long – made this orange Charger more famous than the show itself. More than 320 identical cars were destroyed getting that stunt on film, and the welded-shut doors weren’t a style choice; they were what was left after the abuse this car was built to take.