A stupid over-cammed, lope-idle engine was what I lived for then. When I was Roland, I worked for SS&DI magazine out of Alexandria, Va. I was a newbie. One of the first things that happened to me when I got there was this Hemi Road Runner, for the NFG. You shoulda heard it. This car was a very hot, very desirable factory hot rod, right at the top of the killer list. Though the marketing squids at Mopar pegged it for the burgeoning "youth market," the Road Runner really sprang full-blown from a taxi-cab crude Satellite outfitted with a scary, humungous, hemispherically-lunged fat-block. A rapid executioner dressed in rags, chief. Dual quads, ace. 425 horsepower! Sheesh! What else you gotta know abouddit?
After my head got back to normal size, Jim McCraw and I did this drag test in the fall of 1968. It was the first thing I ever wrote for a magazine. Nearly 40 years later, it gives me more pleasure than pain to read it. It seems obvious that I was completely enthralled by the idea of working for a hot car magazine. It was my ticket to the midway-and to the freak tents-of a unique culture. I was more of a voyeur than a doer, and still am. That's what people who write about this kind of stuff really are. Watchers. Listeners. And there was lots of doing too, but that came later.
I was a demented child of the 1940s, a veteran of the Cold War Nuke Scare, born the same skuzzy mid-summer day Hitler's pals tried to blow him up at some wiggy planning meeting they had in a railroad car. I should have gone to Vietnam as a draftee, but didn't. Had traded off my four-speed, L-79 Chevelle for a used Country Squire station wagon that I thought a married couple with child should be driving. It was just what you did back then. When I got to Super Stock, I hadn't been in anything fast for nearly two years, so matting the throttle on the Hemi was a real thrill, I'll tell you. It revived me, uncorked a restriction somewhere in a vital air passage.
Having read about and driven some of the early musclecars (before they were called that) had put me in solid touch with that life, but most of my activity was vicarious. All the cool engine builds, all the boss road/drag tests, all the loons who'd never make it in a straight job made it possible, were it only on two sides of a sheet of pulpy magazine paper. I had read about it while leaning back with a Coke or a beer. Waking up in the midst of the hot rod, drag race world was rude, and it was better than I could have imagined. Being an insider was very satisfying. It made up for my lack of self confidence, made me feel like somebody if to no one else but me. Right about then I was thinking, "Yow, aren't you so freakin' smart for not falling on that social worker job in Newark?"
So I was inside. So what? I still didn't know anybody. McCraw knew everybody. One of them was Kerry Smith, a guy our age, who ran the Chrysler News Bureau in Manhattan. Amidst the daily PR dreck, he also dealt the test cars. But Kerry was no company man and he was very relaxed when it came to unauthorized test car antics. Ford, Chrysler, GM, and even AMC sanctioned such hyperactivity and the test car fleets were programmed to respond accordingly. The Hemi in this Road Runner could have been prepped by Al Kirschenbaum at Rockville Center Dodge. Not an engine blueprint nor a full-nelson tune up, but rather optimization of all the primary systems. What makes me doubt that K-Bomb tweaked this car is the way it was delivered. It should have had 15-inch Polyglas tires and a 4.10:1 axle ratio, but it came through with F70-14 Polys, 3.55 gears, and the matte black hood stripes were missing too. An absolute stickler for detail, he would have seen to those changes without fail.
Back in those days, the car press car delivery service had yet to be envisioned, so Smith had a full-time driver--a crusty, dumpy, smelly cat we called Cigar Ned. His signatures were the half-smoked cigar butt and a stingy brim hat. Ned would pick up his rides at the Red Ball Garage over on the east side of Manhattan and drive 'em to Eastern Publishing's anonymous door at 522 North Pitt St., in Alexandria. Once the whisky-voiced Ned had drained his bladder, flapped around the office in his flat-bottomed shoes, and fired a new stogey, we'd run him into the train station in D.C., a bizarre of mystery and intrigue. And there we were with a shiny new car and stupid grins on our faces and merry dudes trying to sell you heroin on the sly. We rarely ventured inside. We dumped Ned. We beat it posthaste back to the anonymity and relative safety of the expressway.
The only thing riskier was going to Buddy the typesetter's at night. A spooky, haunted place it was. Denizens reeled around like sharks on the scent of rot. You hated leaving the car. This was really a two-person gig. One stays in the car. The other runs in and out. So, yeah, utility man Gary Long and I took the Road Runner to Buddy's.At night. I drove. Just as Gary was coming back, at least a half-dozen husky forms cluster at the end of the street, not moving, not talking. Bust a move? All I remember was jacking the lever into reverse and backing around a corner then mashing the gas, cutting the wheels left and fishtailing it smoky going in the opposite direction on that deserted street away from the zombies.
I'd been driving the Road Runner since Ned left it and noticed one very peculiar sound it made when the whip came down. Right at the top of First gear, the Torqueflite would make a chattering sound. All the press fleet Mopars we'd test after this one would make that same sound. Our red sedan was relatively skinny, considering the curb weight of 3,390 pounds. What wonders de-contenting can do for performance. The skinny stripper carried only minimal extras, the dfcor group, power (front) disc brakes, AM radio with rear speaker, power steering, and undercoating. But you should have heard those dual quads rip!
Roland the Whelp yaps about the Road Runner's skanky confines: "The interior was finished in black vinyl, and was without benefit of a console (they're no good in the drive-in anyway). Since there was no console, there were no bucket seats and the stick shift was located on the column ala family car. All the accessories were operated by quasi-toggle switches mounted on the dash. With an engine of this magnitude, you'd expect the factory to supply some half-way accurate gauges to hawk it. As usual, there were none. The car did come with a factory tach that wasn't half bad."
I waxed on about the mighty Hemi's 490 lb-ft of grunt and listed all its attributes and specs, as if anyone really cared. As for its composure on the road, that all-iron motor might as well have been a bathtub filled with cement. Combined with a nearly 1-inch thick anti-sway bar, the car understeered mightily and at the slightest provocation. Although I have little recollection, the story I wrote in the fall of '68, said that the Road Runner's suspension was "a tad choppy ...on the stiff side" even. The leaf springs were staggered: six leaves on the left, five leaves plus two half-leaves, on the right, which completely addressed the traction question. There was no wheelhop. Regardless, the Road Runner felt big and square-shouldered on the highway with its heavy springs and torsion bars. And its big disc brakes inspired our misaligned confidence.
There were several other documentations of Hemi Road Runner performance and while none made numbers quite as cool as the one Super Stock & Drag Illustrated tested, it was a solid mid-13 second ride on anybody's drag strip. For the first half of the year I spent at SS&DI, we did all testing at Abby Procopio's two most popular tracks, Capitol Raceway and Cecil County Drag-O-Way, up north by the Pennsy border. Capitol had good bite. Cecil had good bite and was a degree or two downhill from level. We loved running at Abby's because he would leave the chain and padlock off the chain link gates so we could go right in. No one was at the track but us. Almost like having a drag strip all your own. Hey! This was important stuff. We're a nationally distributed magazine getting ready to do an honest-to-God drag test with the hottest car on the planet. See how concerned we are? Can't you read our faces? Please step back. This is serious business!
McCraw and I drove the Plymouth to Capitol in soggy 80-degree air, stripped the trunk clean, put 50 psi in the front tires to reduce rolling resistance, and left the back ones at 35 psi for bite. No slack belts, either. With one foot on the brake and the other on the throttle, I built 1,800 rpm on the converter and then rolled out and let the Torqueflite shift by itself. Wheelspin. A 14.96 at 98.03, chump. Right away I improved on it with a 14.23/101.58. We opened the fresh air vents in the hood and we took the top of the air cleaner off but left the element and baseplate intact. Leaving the Torqueflite in Drive and letting it shift itself pushed the numbers: 13.82/102.85.
McCraw and I were beginning to act like savages. From then on, we shifted the transmission by hand. The first pass like this netted a 13.60 at 105.38! The next run, we held First to 7,000, Second to 6,700, and cleared the traps at 5,500 rpm. That ol' Chizler woofed a 13.53 at 107.27mph. The motor was hot and so was the ambient. We cooled down for more than an hour, liberally soaking the radiator and packing the intake manifold with ice several times.
We made 23 passes that day, the best of which was 13.38 at 108 flat. With slick rubber, this car was a solid 12-second bone-stocker. Considering the Hemi's annihilator torque, the higher numerical 3.55 gears made the engine somewhat more flexible and kept it in the fat part of the torque curve for most of its drag strip run. The real trick was getting the car out of the gate with minimal wheel spin and then plunging deep into the throttle while the torque was fat, all on a 6-inch tread. Yikes! Nearly 500 lb-ft of grunt and back tires the width of one of those rubber bands that holds a clump of broccoli together. You didn't really want to think about it, but now I guess they were pretty heady times.
Notes: Our photographer was Mike Brenner. "Bren Gun" did his own printing then and I remember the morning he showed me how he'd distorted the images by bending the paper while he fired the camera. I couldn't appreciate his art. That kid with the hair bent to the wheel is me shining in my totally synthetic wardrobe-polyester no-press pants, shirt, and plastic loafers included. The car was real, though.