Dave I had a customer who brought his Charger to my Dyno business in the early 80's when I lived in Canberra. He came to us because he'd heard that we had the most miserable chassis Dyno around- and i gotta say it was too!!
My 250rwhp at the rears was everyone else's 300 !
When we bought the workshop where it was installed I asked the former owner when was it last calibrated & he didn't know but was good enough to ask the original owner who said it never had been after installation
Anyway longer story short we got it done & were lucky enough to get a bloke how had just done a refresher course and set it up properly.
Anyhow, back to the bloke. I gathered after a bit of a chat that he knew his way around a car and he said that his Charger was a bit different to any we would ever see. My partner at the time did his apprenticeship at the local Chrysler dealer and he knew all the production codes etc and was a real MOPAR man. Greg had a long chat with the gentleman about the car and asked what could we expect, to which he said 'it will surprise you that's all". Then asked if we would tune and change all the oils which he supplied in plain unmarked containers-hmm a bit odd
Well it sure was a bit different. We knew it a V8 when he drove up, but we sure as hell didn't expect to find what we did. When we got it up to change the oils Greg called me over and said "get a load of this !'' Totally adjustable suspension FRONT & BACK and 4 wheel disc brakes, a 4 speed close ratio gearbox and a big slippery diff as well as a panhard bar or a watts linkage-I can't quite remember! It also had a set of long tube headers and dual system about 3 inch I think. It had the std RT Charger looking rims but 7's on the front & 8's on the rear. Interesting to say the least.
Did the
oil changes etc and dropped it on the ground and lifted the lid to find a 340ci under there-no real biggie but then we looked and it had MSD ignition, and an after market inlet manifold under a real big pancake type airfilter. We took the filter off and there was a Holley 650 double pumper with manual secondaries & choke, and tuning specs decal on the inner guard showing ignition timing AND total timing as well as VALVE Clearances !!?!
About then we got a call from the owner asking "Well I thought I'd give you call to see what you thought- like I said its a bit different!" 'there are some new valve cover gaskets in the boot-can you change them please when you do the valves-you are going to do the valves aren't you!?' Err yes.
We pull the valve covers off to find CRANE roller rockers-Greg says to me-"there's something going on here-! Duh yes! "
Everything on the car had ALL Chrysler markings etc on them and it had the look of being a full on production car not something the owner had done himself. Anyway we did our thing, set it up as per the specs etc and put it over the rollers. I can't remember the numbers but at the time they were HUGE and it was set to rev to 7000 with an ignition cutout in the MSD. If I remember correctly it was putting down about 330 RWHP ! Man we were super impressed-they were very big numbers at the time. Anyway when the owner came to pick it up we had a very long talk. It turns out that he used to be an R & D test development engineer with Chrysler in the very new competition dept when the V8 supercar drama unfolded in 1970's. He said Chrysler had built the required number of bits to make the 250 ?!? cars required to homologate them for BATHURST etc. This particular car was the test vehicle for all the mods. The engines, g'boxes and diffs came in from the States completely assembled from Chrysler and they were very serious about winning until it all went pear shaped. I've got no doubt that the cars would have cleaned up not only Bathurst but ATCC as well. This car was nothing short of stunning. The bloke took the car as part of his severance package and then went to work for BMC on the P76 program-poor fella !!
I remember him saying that Chrysler also built 6 or 7 308ci 6's fitted with 54mm DCOE's (esepcially made for them)and that they were awesome, but Chrysler US said you will use the 340's that we'll send you. I didn't get a chance to drive the car but my partner Greg took it around the block and came back with a big grin, but not as big as when the owner took him for a drive and ran it out to 7 grand in 2nd gear.
Just thought I'd share- would sure like to know what happened to the car though.
Rog