Posts Tagged: gtx
Dennis Collins has walked into a lot of garages on Coffee Walk, but episode 321 finds something different: a decommissioned crop-dusting hangar hiding a 1974 Plymouth Road Runner GTX under decades of dust, its dash decal still intact enough to have viewers commenting on it days later. A self-described Corvette guy shows up in the comments asking Dennis to film a full restoration, despite having no history with Mopars at all. What convinced a die-hard GM owner to root for a Plymouth?
1967 was the year the Plymouth Satellite got quietly outranked by its own family. The new Belvedere GTX arrived that year with a 440 wedgehead V8 and the 426 Hemi, an engine Plymouth had already been selling in the Satellite since 1966. The Satellite carried on as Plymouth’s value performance pick, powered by a 383 available with either a two-barrel or four-barrel carburetor. Here’s how the B-body pecking order shifted in a single model year.
NHRA’s 50 Greatest Drivers list wasn’t slapped together as clickbait – it came out of a genuine blue-ribbon panel debate for the sanctioning body’s 50th anniversary, weighing everything from national event wins to the sport’s technological history. Don Garlits sits at number one, with John Force, Don Prudhomme, Bob Glidden, and Shirley Muldowney rounding out a top five that basically built modern drag racing. Decades later, NHRA even expanded it into a Top 75 list for its 75th anniversary. So who’s your pick for the top spot?
Plymouth needed an answer to the Pontiac GTO, and in 1967 they built one by dropping a standard 440-cubic-inch, 375-horsepower Super Commando V8 into a dressed-up Belvedere and calling it the GTX. Unlike most muscle cars of the era, buyers didn’t have to option their way up to big power – Plymouth handed it to them standard, with the fabled 426 Hemi waiting as an upgrade.
A stock street Mustang meets its match against a 1973 Plymouth Roadrunner GTX built and sponsored by Intellitec College, packing a methanol-burning, supercharged 440 good for 1,100 horsepower and a 9.20-second quarter mile at 150 mph. Viewers have spent over a decade arguing in the comments about whether it even counts as a fair race. It does not, and that is exactly the point. Watch the numbers do the talking once the tree drops.
When Muscle Car Fan’s following crossed half a million, the site marked it with a short trailer instead of a victory lap, a quiet nod to years of owner interviews and feature stories rather than one viral moment. Reaching that scale in a niche this specific says something about how far muscle car nostalgia actually reaches beyond the collector crowd. The bigger story is not the number itself, it is what kept that many people showing up. Watch the trailer and see how it is framed.
Plymouth’s Road Runner nearly died in a hallway argument at Highland Park, killed off by a stylist who swore no cartoon bird would ever wear his sheet metal. The man who saved it was a product planner named Jack Smith, a former Studebaker engineer who also helped create the GTX and who died recently at 94. He never claimed the idea as his own. Read on for how a $3,000 budget bomb beat every projection Plymouth had for it.
A 1967 Ford Fairlane GT and a 1969 Plymouth GTX go head to head at Palm Beach International Raceway, and the gap between them, 11.41 versus 11.25 seconds, turns out to be closer than the numbers suggest. Both owners showed up in the comments to keep the argument going years later. Watch the quarter mile that started a rivalry neither driver has let go of since.
A private collector’s classified ad seeking any 1968-1972 Plymouth Road Runner or GTX, project or finished, highlights just how differently these two closely related muscle cars are remembered decades later. Built on the same platform but aimed at completely different buyers, telling them apart takes more than a glance at the badge. Read on to find out exactly what separates a genuine GTX from a Road Runner, and why the distinction matters so much to serious buyers.
A 1969 Dodge Daytona spent nine years sitting in a Kansas City junkyard, one of roughly fifty impounded cars slowly waiting their turn at the crusher after a used-car dealer’s title fraud scheme collapsed. One collector’s memory of a Richard Petty magazine ad is the only reason it still exists, and the deal he struck to save it was stranger than most restoration stories get. Read on for how it ended up winning a Concours Gold award decades later.
Plymouth built just 7,748 GTXs for 1970, and only 72 of them left the factory with a 426 Street Hemi. Three big-block engines, a collapsing sales chart, and a nameplate Chrysler was already preparing to absorb into the Road Runner line make this one of the most quietly significant Mopars of the era. Read on to find out why a genuine numbers-matching 1970 GTX is so difficult to find today.
Chrysler built the GTX to be a gentleman’s muscle car in 1967, and it worked — for about two years. Then the company’s own Road Runner undercut it on price and style, and the GTX spent the rest of its production run fighting a rival built in-house. Read on to find out how a cheaper stablemate nearly killed one of Mopar’s most underrated performance cars, and why collectors are finally catching on to what made it special.