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1969 Plymouth Road Runner Is the Hardcore Muscle of the Week

Black wheels and a black hood hiding a Six Barrel. What else could you want from a muscle car from back in the day when muscle was just beginning to get big?
1969 Plymouth Road Runner 20 photos
Photo: Mecum
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That’s the short description for the 1969 Plymouth Road Runner we have in the gallery above. As all things Plymouth of that era, we would have loved to still have it around and in production, but that wasn’t the way Chrysler wanted to play it.

The Road Runner was introduced in 1968, as a means for the brand to fight off the bigger, heavier and more expensive muscle cars being constructed by the competition. Build on a stripped down B-body platform and using the suspension usually offered as part of the police package, the Road Runner proved interesting enough to be kept in production until 1980.

Then, the low-priced Road Runner suffered the same fate as the other cars of its kind in the Plymouth lineup, the Barracuda and the GTX. But when it finally kicked the bucket, it left enough material behind for countless rebuilds, restorations, and custom projects.

The one we’re talking about here is a restoration that was completed in 2016. The builders were careful not to tamper too much with the original look of the car, and they opted to keep things simple.

The red paint of the body is beautifully contrasted by the pitch-blackness of the wheels and matte-black fiberglass lift-off hood with a large scoop in the middle.

Under the hood sits a 440ci (7.2-liter) V8 engine equipped with three 2-barrel carburetors and a 4-speed transmission for a total of 390 hp.

The Road Runner seen here is going under the hammer this summer as part of the Mecum Indianapolis auction at the end of June. No estimation as to how much it could fetch has been made.
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About the author: Daniel Patrascu
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Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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