Posts Tagged: Plymouth Road Runner
Looks fade at a stoplight, but sound is what actually sticks with people — and five specific muscle car engines, from Pontiac’s GTO to Dodge’s Challenger R/T, are widely considered to have never been matched by anything Detroit builds today. Watch to hear what made the GTO, 442, Road Runner, Chevelle, and Challenger R/T sound different from everything that came after them.
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.
A 1970 Plymouth Road Runner up for sale hides one of Detroit’s strangest factory options: a vacuum-actuated Air Grabber hood scoop that pops open with a cabin switch. This one pairs it with a 440-cubic-inch V8, a four-speed stick, and a Sure-Grip differential — the combination most real buyers actually chose over the flashier Hemi. Here’s what still makes it worth a second look.
A factory Hemi Road Runner is rare enough on its own, but this 1970 hardtop belongs to an even smaller club: cars built with Chrysler’s TorqueFlite automatic instead of the four-speed most Hemi buyers demanded. MotoManTV takes it for a drive during a 2015 Classic Car Week special, digging into why Plymouth’s rarest drivetrain pairing almost never got ordered at all.
Plymouth priced the Road Runner to undercut everything else on the showroom floor, then quietly offered a 390-horsepower triple-carburetor 440 for $250 more. Fewer than 2,000 buyers in 1970 said yes. Nick’s Garage just put a numbers-matching survivor back on public road, pistol-grip shifter, vinyl bench seat and all.
When Brian Kelly bought this 1970 Road Runner, it was covered in spray-can paint rather than anything close to a factory finish. Six years and a full restoration later, it wears a correct Lemon Twist Yellow over a numbers-appropriate 383 V8 and a Hurst Pistol Grip four-speed. For owner Pat Kelly, though, the real point isn’t the paint or the horsepower. Read on to see what he’s actually chasing behind the wheel.
Long before buyer’s guides and forum threads existed, Chrysler trained its own salesmen with an internal film explaining exactly how to sell a 1970 Road Runner, GTX, Satellite, or Belvedere. Uploaded by Mopar archive channel MyMopar.com and viewed over 83,000 times, it doubles today as an unintentional spec sheet for anyone chasing one of these cars. Watch to see what Chrysler wanted its own salesmen saying on the showroom floor.
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?