 |
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 1970 Plymouth ‘Cuda with a Cummins turbodiesel under the hood sounds like a punchline until you see the build quality and the dyno numbers behind it. Weaver Customs channeled and chopped the body, dropped it onto a Roadster Shop chassis, and fitted the kind of drivetrain nobody expects in an E-body. The result has collected hardware at serious Mopar events. Read on to find out why the ‘Torc’ works so much better than it should.
Dodge invented the Super Bee by taking everything expensive out of a Coronet and leaving everything fast, then spent 1969 escalating the engine list until a 426 Hemi was sitting on the order form. Buried inside that model year was a package aimed at drag racers that Dodge barely advertised. This Gateway Classic Cars gallery captures the result. Read on for the option code that separates a good Super Bee from a great one.
Only 80 of these Dodge Dart GTS Hurst-Hemi coupes ever left the factory, built with fiberglass panels, a stripped interior, and a 426 Hemi tuned strictly for the quarter-mile. Chrysler skipped the radio, the warranty, and just about every comfort feature to shave weight for Super Stock competition. Today, genuine examples can command prices approaching $250,000, and specialists still build faithful reproductions for collectors who cannot find the real thing. Read on to find out what made this stripped-down Dart one of Chrysler’s most extreme factory experiments.
Muscle cars didn’t start with a Pontiac GTO or a Hemi — the arms race traces back to a 1949 Oldsmobile Rocket 88 and escalated for two decades before ending in a nose cone and a 23-inch rear wing on the 1970 Plymouth Superbird. This rundown traces that full arc: the early V8 pioneers, the cubic-inch wars of the 1960s, and the aerodynamic homologation specials that finally forced NASCAR to change its rules. Read on to find out how a mid-sized Oldsmobile led, decades later, to a winged Plymouth built purely to win.