 |
This 1969 Dodge Charger isn’t a restoration, it’s a transplant: the classic fastback body dropped directly onto the chassis of a 2016 Challenger SRT Hellcat. The donor brought a 707-horsepower supercharged HEMI, independent front suspension, modern brakes, and an entirely contemporary cabin beneath unmistakable Coke-bottle sheet metal. Read on to find out why builders keep choosing this approach, and whether a muscle car’s soul lives in its body or its bones.
A Plum Crazy Challenger Hellcat with a folded front end and barely 9,000 miles on the odometer looks like pure waste. It is not. Wrecked Hellcats are routinely parted rather than crushed, because the supercharged engine, transmission, and driveline are worth more separated than the shell is worth whole. The paint code, oddly, is the part that will be hardest to replace. Here is what happens to a car like this next.
A 707-horsepower Challenger Hellcat lined up against a Tesla Model S, dropped the hammer, and snapped its own driveshaft before it reached the sixty-foot mark. The race was over before it started, but the failure exposed something more interesting than any timeslip would have. Read on to find out why the car that broke tells you more about drag racing than the car that won.