Shortly after the release of the deluxe GTX midsize muscle car, Brock Yates pitched the idea of a bare-bones street racer, a stripped Belvedere business coupe stuffed with a Hemi or 440 Super Commando, to Plymouth product planner Jack Smith. Jack Smith, who drove a Belvedere with a breathed-on 383 himself liked the idea.
GTX sales were somewhat soft because they were expensive and Plymouth had a rep as a stodgy brand who sold cars to your maiden aunt and other sober-sided citizens, so it was hard to generate youth appeal. Smith wanted a car that would do a sub seven second 0-60 and a sub fifteen second quarter, right off the showroom floor, with a price tag under $3000. To get interest from the youth demographic, he pursued a character license from Warner Bros, and thus was born the car with the horn that went "BEEP! BEEP!" (Mopar fan lore was that they spent fifty grand getting the horn note just right.)
The side marker lights and grille tell us this Mist Green Plymouth Road Runner with an Antique Green vinyl top is a 1968.
The fact that it's a hardtop means it was made in the latter part of the model year, since the Road Runner was originally only available as a pillared coupe with a bench seat.
The 440 badges on the hood, if they're not lying, mean that someone's upgraded things in the engine bay from the original Road Runner 383 V8, since the '68 was only available with a 383 4bbl or a 426 Hemi. (The standard Road Runner 383 was a 335bhp version, with a hotter cam and other tweaks exclusive to the model, unless you ordered A/C, in which case you got the same Super Commando 330bhp 383 4bbl as in Uncle Lester's Fury.)
When Car and Driver tested the original '68 Road Runner with a 383, four-speed, and optional 3.55:1 limited slip rear end, it cracked off a 7.1 second zero-to-sixty run and a 15.0 quarter mile at 96 mph. It pulled all the way to 114 at redline in fourth, too. They got a little carried away with the options on the test car, like power brakes with discs up front, and the styled wheels like the ones on the car in the photo, which cost $102.05, so the total as-tested price was $3,753 in 1968 dollars, or about $34k in today's dough.
This one was photographed with a Canon EOS-1D Mark IV and EF 24-105mm f/4L IS lens in September of 2022.
Nice, although I'd prefer a vinyl-less roof.
ReplyDeleteIronically, Pontiac had the same idea for a stripped-down muscle car but it wound up being the GTO Judge instead!
Yup!
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