Valiant Charger – Fastest Australian Street Car

The Chrysler Valiant Charger R/T E49 packed a race-tuned 265-cubic-inch Hemi-six into a package that out-accelerated plenty of contemporary V8 muscle, earning Wheels magazine’s title of fastest-accelerating car built in Australia in 1972. Just 149 were built. Its factory top speed sat closer to 131 mph than the 192 mph this post’s title claims, likely reflecting a modified example.

192.17 mph!

192.17 miles per hour is the number in this post’s title, and it belongs to a car most American muscle fans have never even heard of. Australia built its own answer to the muscle car wars in the early 1970s, and one particular six-cylinder Charger ended up embarrassing V8s twice its displacement on both the drag strip and the open road. It should not have worked — a straight-six going toe-to-toe with big-inch domestic V8s sounds like a joke on paper. Instead it became one of the most celebrated performance cars Australia has ever produced, and its top-speed number still gets argued about in classic car circles decades later.

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The Six-Cylinder That Out-Ran V8s

The Chrysler Valiant Charger R/T E49, built in 1972, packed a 265-cubic-inch Hemi-six fitted with triple 45mm Weber carburetors, a baffled sump, tuned-length headers, a shot-peened crank, and a twin-plate clutch — a genuinely race-tuned six-cylinder in an era when everyone assumed only V8s could compete. Just 149 E49s were ever built, making it one of the rarest factory–built Australian performance cars of the muscle car era.

The Numbers That Made It Legendary

Wheels magazine crowned the E49 the fastest-accelerating car made in Australia in 1972, with a 302–horsepower rating, a 14.4-second standing quarter-mile, and 0-100 mph in 14.1 seconds — beating six-cylinder assumptions and plenty of contemporary V8 muscle in the process. Its factory top speed came in around 211 km/h, or roughly 131 mph, a very different number from the 192.17 mph this post’s title claims, which likely reflects a modified or specially-prepared record-run example rather than a stock E49.

Why It Still Matters

Decades later, the Valiant Charger E49 remains one of the most sought-after and celebrated performance cars to come out of Australia‘s own muscle car era — proof that displacement wars were never quite as simple as bigger-V8-wins, even on the other side of the Pacific from Detroit. American muscle car forums still debate whether that 192 mph figure belongs to a heavily breathed-on E49 running an unofficial top-speed event, or simply got attached to this photo somewhere along the way — either way, the real factory number is impressive enough on its own.

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