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Only around 80 of these Hurst-built Hemi Darts ever left the Hamtramck factory in 1968, stripped to the bone for one job: winning NHRA Super Stock races. One surviving example just turned up at a South Dakota drag strip running a 9.20 at 146 mph — except its owner pulled the rare original 426 Hemi for something even bigger. Here’s why that was actually the right call.
A green Road Runner sits against a plain background, daring Mopar fans to name its exact model year from the details alone. Plymouth built this car across three closely related seasons, and the differences are subtle enough to trip up even seasoned collectors. Read on to find out which year this one actually is.
Tom Lembeck’s Mopar collection includes two of the rarest muscle cars ever built: a 1969 Dodge Charger Daytona in Spring Green and a 1970 Plymouth Superbird in Vitamin C Orange, both packing factory 426 Hemi engines. Filmed side by side in Chicago, the pairing even fooled a passerby who walked right past without noticing. Fans in the comments are split on which winged Mopar deserves the edge. Watch to see which one Tom calls his favorite.
A mysterious triple-black Dodge Challenger terrorized Detroit’s street racing scene for years, vanishing after every win before anyone could identify the driver. Decades later, his own son helped uncover the truth: the man behind the wheel was a decorated Army veteran and Detroit motorcycle cop who couldn’t risk being caught. The Black Ghost eventually sold for $975,000 — but its real value was the story nobody knew until it was gone.
A Plymouth Superbird and a Ford Mustang went head-to-head in the Search For Speed league, but the real story wasn’t horsepower — it was a launch gone wrong. Viewers, including at least one Superbird owner himself, pinned the loss squarely on tire spin rather than the car, while others argued the whole matchup was unfair to begin with since the Superbird was built for Daytona’s high banks, not the quarter-mile.
Before the Road Runner or GTX existed, Plymouth offered its 425-hp Street Hemi in the understated 1966 Satellite, and only 503 four-speed hardtops were ever built. Owner Randy Cook found one identical to the car he watched race as a kid and traded his own car to get it. Lou Costabile takes a ride in the Forest Green Hemi that makes two grown men laugh the moment the hood goes up.
A 425-horsepower Hemi Super Bee went wheel to wheel with a Corvette packing a secretly underrated L88 427, and somehow came out ahead at the stripe. The Corvette turned the higher trap speed. The Dodge turned the better reaction time. This is how a factory-legal Mopar built to the edge of its rulebook nearly took down one of GM’s rarest big-blocks.
Only 2,743 buyers ordered the R/T package on a 1971 Dodge Charger, and just 63 of those left the factory with a 426 Hemi under a mandatory RamCharger hood. Steve Dulcich’s own ‘Golden Boy’ is one of the survivors still doing exactly what Dodge built it to do — getting driven, hard, on the open road.
A factory Hemi Road Runner is rare enough on its own, but this 1970 hardtop belongs to an even smaller club: cars built with Chrysler’s TorqueFlite automatic instead of the four-speed most Hemi buyers demanded. MotoManTV takes it for a drive during a 2015 Classic Car Week special, digging into why Plymouth’s rarest drivetrain pairing almost never got ordered at all.
