Here's the basic story of our 1971 Dodge Challenger R/T:
I originally bought this car for my wife shortly before we got married back in 1988. I had another `71 Challenger street machine that was beginning to cost a lot of money to keep going. I thought it'd be nice to have one fast Challenger, and one stocker. Well, trying to do two cars at once turned out to be more than I could handle, so we opted to sell off the street machine Challenger (that was a 318 car, anyway), and focus our money and energy on treating the original R/T with the respect it deserved. We had a friend strip the rust-free Arizona body down to bare metal and refinish it with the correct FY1 Top Banana paint. Meanwhile, I went through the 383 Magnum, 4spd tranny and 4.30 rear end in preparation for reassembly. After a couple years of enjoying the car all restored, I decided to change the tranny over to a 727 auto due to a variety of difficulties we were experiencing with the manual set up, not to mention that the car was slowly getting faster through a series of performance upgrades and I didn't want to twist the sheetmetal in case I bolted on some slicks. The engine has a measly 8.7:1 compression, 292/509 Mopar cam, 750 annular discharge Holley, Thorley headers and Edelbrock 383 torker intake. On street tires with closed exhaust it runs consistent 13.0's at about 108mph. We drive this car as often as Michigan weather permits and we use it for going out to dinner and to get ice cream for our young kids. Our 6 year old daughter already wants to know if this car will be "hers" one day. I didn't give her a clear answer on that just yet, but it probably will. :)
Thanks again for a great website!
Dale Cramer, aka "peelerboy"
