The Perfect Bare-Bones Muscle Car

In 1968, the first muscle cars were moving away from the true spirit of muscle cars, which was a fast car that was affordable for the common man. So the folks at Plymouth Cars, a division of Chrysler, even though they already had a high-performance car out in the market (the GTX), went back to the drawing board. They wanted to build a car that was not only fast and powerful but one that wouldn't burn a hole in an ordinary worker's pocket. These goals were met, and then some. This new car that was able to do the quarter-mile at 14 seconds and costs just under $3000. This is how the Plymouth Roadrunner was born.

Plymouth paid Warner Brothers a large amount of money just so they could use the name and image of their famous fast-running cartoon character. They even spent $10,000 (an exorbitant amount in the 1960's) just to develop a horn that made noises like the "beep-beep" sound made by the Roadrunner in the cartoons.

When the boys at Plymouth said they were going back-to-basics with the Roadrunner they weren't kidding. True to the essence of muscle cars, anything that wasn't essential was left out. The interior was very sparse, with just a basic cloth and vinyl bench seat; they used a bench seat because the shifter was just basically a metal rod protruding out of the floor. The shifter only had a rubber boot to cover it and there was an a centre console to raise it. And in the earlier models there wasn't even any carpeting. There weren't many options when it came to the Roadrunner, just the basic AM/FM radio, air-conditioning (except for the one with a 426 Hemi engine), and automatic transmission, power steering, and front disc brakes; it's was as basic as you could get.

Plymouth concentrated on the thing that really made a muscle car, the engine. Although they put a smaller Hemi engine in the Roadrunner, it could still go as fast if not faster than the high-end GTX. This is because the Roadrunner had a better power-to-weight ratio; since everything that was not needed for the car to go fast was omitted, it made the car lighter than the GTX.

The Plymouth Roadrunner was truly a testament to the saying "less is more."

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