Quote:
Originally Posted by Tcoat
EDIT: Please read later post in conjunction with this.
Please look at the picture closely what are they advertising it doing?
For that matter the T in R/T stands for track.
It was not an attempting to minimize in any way. I have never heard of the guy before and to me he is just some dude who wrote a book. I am not mad in any way the subject matter just makes it appear that way.
|
That's a great old advertisement. My family have always been big into Mopar. So I have some background. So now it's old guys fighting about cars time...
R/T = "Road/Track" in Mopar speak, i.e.
"sporty for the road", not "competition car." Dodge gave and still gives R/T to many of it's sportier cars, and to most of their muscle cars back in the day. Let's not forget about what the "R" and just mention the "T". Looking at Dodge's lineup over the years and it's clear that serious models were rarely ever given the R/T designation as there were usually models above them in performance. The "T" was a way to get people thinking their car is more capable than it is. Chrysler's naming scheme still works that way today. R/T is sporty, SRT is decidedly more serious.
I know you're aware of this but Muscle cars are well known to be built on repurposed passenger car chassis like the the "B" chassis Coronet. 400bhp for 5000lbs of Chicago steel.
An unmodified muscle car is sporty no doubt, but it's no Sportscar. I think Colin Chapman would agree.
You probably also already know this, so it's for anyone that cared to read through this mess. The Coronet had a sister car that was further improved to make it actually suitable for competition. That was the
Super Bee (B for "B" chassis).
All in all, it still took
a lot of extra hardware to make the Coronet R/T perform and survive in any sort of competition. The SuperBee fixed this. That is things that commonly broke on the muscle car R/T model when pushed hard. Beefier suspension, tires that could actually hold the load, a ram air hood that actually worked, and most importantly an uprated 4 speed manual transmission. The R/T was a muscle car for the street. The SuperBee was meant for the weekend warrior. It sold in very low volumes mostly due to the added cost. In later years the marketing positions for these cars would change. The Coronet would return to it's sedan roots in favor of the sportier Challenger. The Super Bee would be reused as a trim package, but when talking about the Coronet for the purposes of this discussion, I believe the above to be most accurate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_Super_Bee
R/T
Super Bee
