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Only a handful of cars in history ever left a Dodge factory wearing both a towering rear wing and a 426 Hemi under the hood, and Tom Lembeck owns one of them. The Charger Daytona was not built to look fast at a car show; it was built because Dodge was losing on Sunday and needed something drastic. Read on to find out what Dodge was really trying to prove, and why so few Hemi versions exist.
Barrett-Jackson’s 2017 Northeast auction at Mohegan Sun led with a 1971 Dodge Hemi Challenger R/T and a pair of 1970 Plymouth ‘Cudas, and the production figures behind those cars explain the interest better than any catalog description. Chrysler built just 71 Hemi Challenger R/T hardtops for 1971, and fewer than 800 Hemi ‘Cudas across the model’s entire life. Read on for what those numbers mean and why documentation now decides the price.
Three days isn’t nearly enough time to see everything Chrysler ever built parked in one place, but the Mopar Nationals crowd tries anyway. Held at a drag strip with roots along the old National Road, the event has grown into one of the largest single-marque gatherings in the country. Read on to find out what keeps it growing after nearly four decades.
A teenager who fell in love with Mopars watching quarter-mile battles at a Rhode Island airstrip in the early ’60s spent decades chasing down the car that started it all: a 1964 Plymouth Savoy carrying Chrysler’s Max Wedge engine in its final and rarest form. Here’s why that one model year, and that one drivetrain combination, was never repeated.
Fast Lane Classic Cars in St. Charles, Missouri turned driver Tom Abbett loose on a rotating lineup of Ford, Chevy, Buick, Pontiac, and Plymouth muscle for nearly fifteen straight minutes — no superchargers, no turbos, just big American V8s including a 572 Hemi and a 427 Corvette viewers still praise for its sound alone. It’s less a single car review than a moving soundtrack of what Detroit and Fast Lane’s shop floor sound like together. Watch to hear which engine note sticks with you longest.
A vintage road test puts a 1969 Dodge Charger 500 — Dodge’s NASCAR homologation special, built to fix the standard Charger’s high-speed aerodynamics — through its paces with the 426 Hemi under the hood. Announcer Bud Lindeman narrates in period broadcast style, and the comments are full of viewers’ own Hemi street stories. Watch to hear the line that’s still quoted decades later.
Barn Find Hunter’s Tom Cotter pulls off an Arizona highway for a cinder-block motorcycle shop and finds a pair of Mopars for sale in the desert — then discovers a set of original big-block Camaros parked nearby. Both Camaros sold quickly after the episode aired, and the comments add their own barn-find stories, from a numbers-matching Impala to a first-gen El Camino fans can’t stop talking about. Hagerty’s series keeps proving how much original muscle is still hiding in plain sight. Watch to see what else Tom finds.
Muscle At The Strip, formerly Mopars At The Strip, brought the Mopar Muscle Scat Pack Challenge and Hellcat Shootout to The Strip At Las Vegas on April 21 through 23, 2017, splitting the field between 392 Apache Hemi cars and 707-horsepower supercharged Hellcats. Both brackets went to manual-transmission cars, an upset in classes the eight-speed automatics usually dominate. Read on to find out how the stick shifts pulled it off.
John’s widebody Hellcat Challenger cost $83,000, and according to this video, it’s developed damage again — the kind that’s split his comment section between “take it to the dealer immediately” and “that’s just modern Hellcat ownership.” Between an electrical tape debate and a stability control fault viewers are tracing back to the shocks, this is less a build reveal than a real-time look at what owning a heavily modified, six-figure-adjacent Mopar actually involves. Watch to see what breaks next.
Clay and Sons Mopar recycling yard in rural Missouri hides more factory-original muscle than most private collections, and The Auto Archaeologist’s latest find proves it: a real 1968 GTX still wearing its original 426 Hemi and 4-speed. The yard behind it holds Darts, a Barracuda, and a yellow Coronet that have viewers calling it Mopar heaven in the comments. Watch to see what else is sitting in that field.
Every scene featuring the two Mopars from Joe Dirt, the 2001 comedy starring David Spade, gets stitched together in this compilation, his battered Charger Daytona replica and a convertible dressed up as a Plymouth GTX. Sharp eyed Mopar fans in the comments have spent years picking apart which details are accurate and which give the movie car away. Watch the film’s most memorable machines without sitting through the rest of the plot.
Auto Archaeology returns to a hidden Mopar collection split between an abandoned auto parts showroom and a barn buried into a hillside — a find significant enough that Hot Rod magazine covered it separately. One commenter adds real depth on Chrysler’s High-Impact color program, explaining how Plymouth’s Moulin Rouge, In Violet, and Vitamin C matched Dodge’s differently-named Panther Pink, Plum Crazy Purple, and Go Mango. See what else the second visit uncovers.
A downtown food break turned into an impromptu grudge race when a Honda Civic owner bragging about his stripped, “tuned” 2.2-liter engine challenged two friends cruising their vintage Dodge Chargers — including a bone-stock 1970 model driven by someone who had never raced before. What followed split viewers into two camps and reignited an argument that’s never really settled. Watch to see how it played out.
A 1970 Dodge Challenger and a 1968 Hemi Dart share an engine family and almost nothing else. One was Dodge’s upmarket answer to the pony car wars, sold at dealerships nationwide with everything from a slant six to a 426 Hemi. The other was built off-site by Hurst because Chrysler refused to sanction it, in a run of just 80 cars. Read on for how both came to exist, and why they sound nothing alike.
A 1973 Plymouth Duster spent decades under bedsheets in a Toledo, Ohio grandmother’s garage before it emerged with only 22,000 original miles — and later gained a stroked 472-cubic-inch Hemi built by Ray Barton. Sold through Vanguard Motor Sales, the car pairs a period-correct green interior with a magazine-featured Sublime Green rotisserie restoration. No official horsepower number has ever been published, but the parts list makes the case on its own.