RoadRunner

The 1974 RoadRunner featured.

The most recent issue of my Hemmings Classic Car magazine (April 2014) features a 1974 Plymouth RoadRunner with only 7,200 miles.
Such a car is a find, but it’s not the best-looking RoadRunner to my mind, the first, 1968/69.

This is a 1969.

In fact, the car featured isn’t a four-speed floorshift. It’s a TorqueFlite automatic.
The RoadRunner was Plymouth returning to musclecar roots. Basic transportation with a hotrod motor and floor-shifted four-speed.
Plymouth’s intermediate sedan with 383 four-speed.
It was a smashing success! It wasn’t a musclecar with a gigantic hotrod motor.
But such musclecars were getting out of the price-range of the average buyer.
Plymouth was marketing a car the owner of a souped-up Tri-Chevy would want. Plymouth was also selling the GTX, a competitor to Pontiac’s G-T-O. But it wasn’t selling — it cost too much.
I remember driving a RoadRunner-type Plymouth during my college days. But it wasn’t a RoadRunner — it was 1964.
It was a 383 four-speed. A friend got it to replace his 413 300G Chrysler.
I slammed it through the gears, and in seconds was doing 120 on the clock.
It felt big and blowzy, but getting to 120 was effortless.
Here was a car to replace the SmallBlock Tri-Chevy, although I kept wanting a four-speed ’55 Chevy Bel Air hardtop with 327 ‘Vette motor.
My neighbor in Rochester had a ’68 RoadRunner.
But it was automatic transmission, more a mom’s taxi.
But a least with a four-barrel dial-exhaust 383 it could get out of its own way.
Some drunk totaled it. Plowed into it with his big beige Catalina hardtop coming home from the tavern.
3 a.m. the driver was pounding on our door.
He was bleeding profusely, so I called the cops, and told him to go back to his crumpled car.
I was not turned on by his apology.
By now my neighbor was out.
Drivers were always totaling cars on our street.
Her RoadRunner was first; next was an Omni, then came my neighbor’s Cutlass-Supreme, which had been restored.
I think her RoadRunner got totaled in 1978, which means by then it was 10 years old.
But it was a nice car, even if it was only a mom’s taxi.
A dreadful loss.
But it wasn’t what to me is the RoadRunner concept; a 383 four-speed street-racer.
I never really liked the RoadRunner; it was too big!
But it looked great, and the concept was great too.

• “Tri-Chevy” is 1955, 1956, and 1957.