Funny, when I was a kid, I made my cars look like drag cars. Big wheels and tires out back, small ones up front and an exaggerated forward rake. Once I grew up, all my cars were more like Trans-Am cars. Big wheels and tires all around and trim set low and level.
It's good to know that Trans Am never fully abandoned sanity as did NASCAR and Pro Stock. You used to be able to see YOUR car out on the strip or track with some different tires and maybe a scoop on it, (okay, and an extended nose in the case of Pro Stock) but now? The racing field of Pro Stock What are those cars? Camaros? Mustangs? Peterbilts? Chicken eggs? Just read the stickers on the front and side to find out! NASCAR looks like a giant robot chicken laid a clutch of eggs on a race track. Trans Am, if it were ballyhooed more, would sell more cars than it does presently. Meanwhile Dodge: "Like, OMG Beckyyy, we TOTALLY don't do the road-racing thing, like OMG that is sooo creepyyyy!!!" It shows how utterly out-of-tune with reality the "leadership" at the Eurosissy conglomerate at Stellantis are in their eagerness to destroy the muscle car. I hope the same people don't get ahold of Trans Am. We don't need Yet Another Racing Series where the difference between the cars is a "Ford" or "Chevy" sticker on the door. At least when the Germans owned Mopar, or much of it, there were some real men still allowed to work at American car companies. Evidently that is not so at Stellantis, and in their frantic rush to kill the Hemi, most likely due to fat bribes paid by Chevy and Ford, they are introducing the idiotic, no-one-wants-it inline 6. I don't care about the excruciating NEED Eurosissy CEO's feel to annihilate America and anything American. They aren't doing it for profit. They are doing it to DESTROY. "Like OMG I TOTALLY have this GREAT idea! Let's destroy the best-selling musclecar EVER because if I do, my owners will have a the most colossal nerdgasm, even though it will cost us tens of billions of dollars in lost sales, plus market dominance and the headspace of all the young boys who could have grown up looking forward to having a Hemi musclecar!" Not everyone on Earth subscribes to the Cult of Thunberg, or whatever the latest Emergency We Are All Going to Die Crisis of Crisisness is brayed and shrieked about as an excuse to find yet another strategy to destroy more American stuff. We don't BELIEVE you. No, Stellantis. We don't NEED you. We don't need your climate lies. We don't NEED anything about you, and some of us recognize that the fake Klimate Krazy Krisis is just yet another mask worn by the same types of creeps doing what they have been doing since the 1960's: murdering everything masculine and American they can get their filthy hands on. What Mopar needs once it has been rescued from the current crop of crazies is a direct tie-in to a NASCAR-type racing series PLUS Trans Am PLUS Pro Stock. They need to cater to the dreams of young boys everywhere for a car that "I'm going to build when I'm older." Right now, they are working extra-hard to DESTROY that. Mopar needs to sponsor a new racing series of all-steel-all-real-factory-body cars with the only restrictions being 5.7 liters, no body modifications from showroom stock and some big, fat, tires, oh, and a big, healthy rear wing if desired, that can change its pitch with speed automatically. Call it Formula Steel. Only Ford, GM, and Mopar allowed in it. THEN, have REAL STOCK drag racing. Bodies of the cars are stock bodies-in-white. No big blocks, only the same motors you can get in the showroom, naturally aspirated, on carbs or fuel injection, with big scoops on the STOCK hoods. If they wake up and start selling big-blocks, then 7000 RPM limit, and no limit on revs for small blocks, like the Hemi and LS motors and the Ford pushrod engines. Can you imagine the inspiration of a Hemi screaming at the stars at 11,000 RPM? How about an "off the street" class whose only modifications are bolt-ons available? Hellcats dueling with Shelbys and Yenkos. The future is bright.
I like this part: "To qualify for Trans-Am racing, Plymouth and Dodge had to sell 2,400 (each) 1970 Plymouth AAR ‘Cuda and Challenger T/A models." Shades of the Porsche 50-917's-in-a-neat-row for homologation purposes Homologation. the cattle prod to FORCE carmakers to produce hot, sexy cars in order to enter a car based on it in a race. Hence the Ferrari 250GTO, and the 288GTO: Gran Turismo Omologato. one such 250 just sold for 48.4 million dollars: These gave birth to some of the greatest cars in history of which enough were produced to allow more people to enjoy them. 288 GTO: The Challenger GTO would be a truly wondrous project. All-aluminum structure and engine, added and integrated stainless steel cage/door beams, etc. Carbon fiber hood and deck lid (if either were even lighter.) Carbon fiber-barrel wheels. FAR larger wheelwells for far wider tires, and of course, 17" wheels with some truly monstrous tires of at least the same height as the Hellcat's 20's. A Hellcat for the road course! Dual brake calipers up front end for low profile to clear them little wheels. Thick, sexy rotors of aluminum or iron and there you have an instant "sells profitably for $250,000, immediately flipped for $1,000,000 to $2,000,000 or wisely sells for $1,000,000 out the door bunch of homologation specials. I predict they would sell all 5000 of them before they even hit the showroom floors. 5 billion dollars of more revenue! Front splitter with vortex generators and a flat-as-a-board underbody (or tunnels to cultivate the vortices.) Guaranteed kids' college fun and your retirement fund all rolled into one investment package. Can you imagine the gray hair this would cause at Ford and Chevy? "You guys are going Trans Am Racing in an all-aluminum, 3100 pound Challenger? They might do like they did to Ford when Ford Capris were mopping the floor with others in Trans Am: force them to bolt in some weight to "bring parity." Which Dodge would immediately use in the front splitter area to put the weight as far forward and low as possible, movable from one side to the other in case mostly-right or mostly-left turn tracks are encountered! Sidepipes for even better ground clearance. Are you ready to make an extra 10 billion dollar windfall, Dodge? GTO Challenger. GTO Viper. A new era in American dominance. The Viper in carbon fiber (you can boost sales by having a hood two people can stand on, just ask an earlier Corvette salesman who sold a Corvette based on that exact fact to someone looking at a Viper and a Corvette.) Women LOVE a sexy car that can also be used to have a, picnic or dance lessons on the hood. I sat on the trunk of my Satellite with my gf to have an actual picnic once. Chryslers are epic. I also used the hood and windshield as a bed once at a rest stop. I had an owl fly right over me between me and the stars. This is a multibillion-dollar idea, Mopar. They might have to sponsor a new American Racing Cars series. Anyone can race any car that they bought from the manufacturer in America. A new era of home-brewed road racing.
