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February 2017 produced a pony car sales result almost nobody predicted: the Dodge Challenger, on a platform already a decade old, comfortably outsold the freshly redesigned Chevrolet Camaro while the Ford Mustang took the month outright. The numbers said something uncomfortable about what buyers actually want from a muscle car. Read on for the figures and what they revealed about the segment.
The 1972 Dodge Challenger is the model year enthusiasts tend to skip past, and the reasons are all on the order form. Both big-block options were gone, the convertible was cancelled, and the front end wore a restyle that departed from the original look. Dodge built 26,658 of them, down nearly 11 percent from 1971. Read on to find out why that unloved transitional year is quietly becoming interesting to collectors.
Most show builds are engineered to turn heads for a season. This 1971 Dodge Challenger has been doing it for roughly two decades and still looks like it left the shop last week. Pro Street was a style born from NHRA Pro Stock cars of the early eighties, and getting it to age this well takes more restraint than shock value. Read on for what defines a tubbed car, and why 1971 Challengers made such good raw material.
Dodge built roughly 29,800 Challengers for 1971. Just 71 of them left the factory with the 426 Hemi, and 1971 was the last year the street Hemi was offered at all. A dual-quad R/T like this one is not simply a rare Challenger — it is the closing page of one of the most famous engine programs Detroit ever ran. Here is what made the Hemi so scarce, so expensive, and so difficult to live with.
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.
A 2015 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat turned up at the Pigeon Forge Rod Run wearing modifications its owner never bothered to explain, parked among hot rods four times its age. The stock car already made 707 horsepower and held an NHRA-certified 11.2-second quarter mile, which makes the question of what got changed more interesting, not less. Here is what that supercharged HEMI actually is, what owners typically do to them first, and why a barely-used car earned a spot at one of the South’s oldest gatherings.
Somewhere in the Mopar world sits a small handful of 1970 Dodge Challenger R/Ts that even seasoned Hemi historians rarely get to see in person, built around a fiberglass hood borrowed from a racetrack homologation special. Few buyers understood what they were ordering, and the option vanished from build sheets almost as fast as it appeared. Read on to find out just how rare this Hemi and N94 hood combination really was.
Fiat Chrysler’s decision to renew its trademark on the Cuda name reignited a rumor that has refused to die for the better part of a decade: that Dodge might resurrect one of Mopar’s most storied nameplates. The renewal alone proves nothing, since automakers routinely protect names they have no plans to use. Read on to find out what the paperwork actually reveals, and why the speculation keeps coming back.
A homemade video shot at a small Michigan dragstrip in 2001 captures something the big-budget car shows almost never do: what grassroots Mopar racing actually looked like when nobody was performing for a camera crew. Pat Muscle Car Fan’s footage from Ubly Dragstrip is a time capsule of a scene that shaped how an entire generation of Mopar owners learned to race.