Posts Tagged: Mopar
Plymouth once paid Warner Bros. $50,000 just so the Road Runner could borrow a cartoon bird’s name and its ‘beep-beep’ horn — and it turned into one of Detroit’s best-ever marketing bets. By 1970, the car had a redesigned Air Grabber hood and a genuine 425-horsepower Hemi option, but only 152 buyers ever ordered one. This numbers-style 440 Six Barrel hardtop shows what nearly everyone else actually drove home instead.
Dodge’s new 550-horsepower Charger Scat Pack borrows a nameplate that goes back to 1969 — but the original “Six Pack” didn’t have six cylinders at all, it had six carburetor barrels bolted to a 440 V8. A week of real-world commuting captured with binaural microphones shows what the twin-turbo namesake actually delivers: a 3.7-second 0-60 time and a driving experience nobody expects from a car named after a decades-old carburetor joke.
A budget build project just put a rough, 383-powered 1971 Dodge Charger back in the spotlight, and third-generation fans say it’s about time. Dodge rebuilt the Charger from the ground up that year, yet the car still lives in the shadow of the 1968-70 version. Here’s why builders are starting to see it differently.
Plymouth sold the 1969 GTX as the muscle car for buyers who wanted power without giving up polish – a blacked-out grille, an upscale cabin, and a 375-horsepower 440 standard with no options required. Only 208 of that year’s 15,602 GTXs left the factory with the legendary 426 Hemi instead. Here’s what it takes to get one of the more common 440 survivors running exactly the way Plymouth intended.
Dodge hid its rarest 1968 big-block under the skin of its cheapest compact, and only 991 buyers ever got the 383-and-four-speed combination. Jay Leno tracked one down for his own personal collection, not a guest’s car passing through. Here’s why a plain-looking Dart could out-run muscle cars twice its size.
A modern-day Hyundai fender bender nearly finished off a 1968 Dodge Coronet R/T that a 426 Hemi option couldn’t outsell. Its owner Rick rebuilt it instead, and the car now carries a fitting new name: Mayhem. See what the factory 440 Magnum and a set of line locks can still do almost six decades later.
For $2,547, Plymouth handed buyers a compact built to look forgettable, with a genuine 340 cubic-inch V8 hiding under that plain sheet metal. Here’s how the Duster 340 quietly became one of Detroit’s smartest muscle car buys, and why numbers-matching survivors are only now getting the collector attention they’ve earned.
Plymouth built only 64 of these 440 Six Barrel Sport Fury GTs for 1970, and this one had not turned over since a minor accident parked it in 1981. Dead Dodge Garage spent months chasing a stubborn carburetor problem before finally coaxing the numbers-matching big-block back to life. What they found under the hood tells a bigger story about how few of these full-size muscle cars are still running today.
Richard Boehl has owned his 1971 Dodge Charger R/T 440 Six Pack — part of a production run of just 178 cars — since 1986, and he’s collected plenty of speeding tickets along the way. Filmed at Carlisle Events for My Car Story with Lou Costabile, this Concours-caliber Charger runs a triple-carburetor big block that sounds nothing like a standard four-barrel setup. Watch to hear it, and hear Boehl’s stories, for yourself.
A numbers-matching 1971 Plymouth ‘Cuda with the rare 440 Six Barrel engine and a four-speed manual is about to cross the auction block in Las Vegas — one of only 108 Plymouth ever built with that exact combination. Its quad headlights and shark-gill fender vents mark it as a one-year-only design, and its drivetrain still carries the original numbers. Here’s what makes this ‘Cuda worth watching when the gavel drops.