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The Hellcat era officially ends!

You'll have to tell the T5 in my old 5.0 that then (250k miles, zero issues).
The younger fellas at the track would try to tell me all the time about how I was going to have to
replace it and the 8.8 rear "every 3 races" because they were supposedly "fragile".
Nope....but I did watch many a GM go boom during races. :)
Most were fragile. They didn't put a rear end from a one ton dump truck and 18 spline transmissions in Mopar muscle cars for nothing.
 
An interesting vid Tony did on the Fox 5.0

 
An interesting vid Tony did on the Fox 5.0


Thsat's a big part of his history, his relationship with the fox bodies.
I had no idea in those days - I didn't subscribe to the mags he wrote in.
 
Here’s Steve Collison back in ‘89 running the the 5 speed Petersen Publishing backed car at Atco.

 
And we all know who was behind that in 2021.

:rolleyes:
This is the part of my posts I was tip toe-ing around. This is why they postponed the end of the platform and moved it back to 2024, it was supposed to go from a 6 banger to the EV stuff, but a wrench got thrown into that plan so now they are just yanking the rug out. Like a lot of things, really, that people shouldn't talk about in this section.
 
People sure love to hate on Mustangs.
And yet they have been used as the benchmark for like 40 years and counting now.
"I beat a Mustang"
If they are so BS **** worthy, then why is it a bragging point to beat one?

People that go off on them let their brand bias show a little. It's fine to have a favorite too :)

Oh I had 3 of them, a POS 1970 burnout machine that I sold when I bought my home, an 84 Capri with a 351W swapped in it, whcih by the way the factory T5 and 8.8 did not explode despite the car winding the speedo past 85, all the way back around to 40 again..... sold that one before it got me....
And a 94 I built to cruise county trunk roads here I sold to my boy now. Factory T5 has 160k on it, third gear synchros are about shot.... rear end got new seal kit and friction stuff when I swapped gears to 3:55.

The 94 was a daily in the summer for ten years. No issues really, although I guess you could count the distributer wearing out at 140k miles to the point the pickup didn't work right.

Now I have Mopars. And one 8.1/Allison tow pig crew cab chebby.
 
What our naysayer friend is omitting from the discussion is the fact that the foreign overlords of Dodge
continued for several years to produce the RWD cars even after the "2016 crucifixion".
Why? Simple, it's always about demand and $$$ - and I guarantee some bean-counting estimation,
of course - that told them if they invested in buying the company, they'd get so much of a return by
continuing the lines of Chargers and Challengers.

To be even further honest about it, they did continue to make minor improvements to both over time, too;
it gave them more time to work on the engineering of the electric stuff to come as well.
It was only when demand slipped below some pre-determined level that they decided to finally pull the plug.
This is not true whatsoever.
As I mentioned before, if demand was a reason, the caravan would not have been cut from the lineup.
Reasons behind the postponement are alluded to in this thread. The direction from the top took non-economic specific points into consideration, but they laid out the plan initially back then. It just got adjusted like a whole lot of other things during a certain span of time.

No one can use the argument demand and $$ is a driving reason for anything given the state of EV stuff today. Logical business things like "people want to buy this" have been superceded by a number of other things. This is not a phenomenon that started yesterday. When it started is a topic for a different forum section.
 
46FC4016-E2CD-428E-AB28-AA95B1DBFD7C.jpeg
 
Am I the only one who thinks the Challenger and Charger Hemi cars might make a comeback? Maybe the TRX and the Hemi Durango. The outlook for EVs is a lot dimmer than it was two years ago. Can company X just buy all the tooling and continue them? If a certain person gets elected the upcoming stringent laws on ICE vehicles will go away. Stellantis may not be the player here but someone could take over.

Maybe make some stripped-down versions of the existing vehicles. Keep the power, lose the fluff.
 
Am I the only one who thinks the Challenger and Charger Hemi cars might make a comeback? Maybe the TRX and the Hemi Durango. The outlook for EVs is a lot dimmer than it was two years ago. Can company X just buy all the tooling and continue them? If a certain person gets elected the upcoming stringent laws on ICE vehicles will go away. Stellantis may not be the player here but someone could take over.

Maybe make some stripped-down versions of the existing vehicles. Keep the power, lose the fluff.
It's going to take a changing of the guards to make that happen!
 
So true,history is repeating itself all over again!
Another repeating part of history will be the dumping of parts ...NS-1, NS-2, NS-3 in 3, 2, 1
 
This is not true whatsoever.
As I mentioned before, if demand was a reason, the caravan would not have been cut from the lineup.
Reasons behind the postponement are alluded to in this thread. The direction from the top took non-economic specific points into consideration, but they laid out the plan initially back then. It just got adjusted like a whole lot of other things during a certain span of time.

No one can use the argument demand and $$ is a driving reason for anything given the state of EV stuff today. Logical business things like "people want to buy this" have been superceded by a number of other things. This is not a phenomenon that started yesterday. When it started is a topic for a different forum section.
Please do feel free to offer any tangible proof of your assertations then.

Corporations sometimes will cow to the will of governments, especially if beholden to them (bailouts, etc.)
- but we all know in a capitalistic society, eventually they all return home to roost at the feet of profits.
Government mandates
aside, they ultimately have stockholders to answer to, as always - and corporations are
most interested in what will sell the most in the near-term, again due to the pressures of their
overlords.

It's why we see many of them now backing away from pure electric vehicles - they offered, the sales
weren't nearly what they wanted, so now it's "hold the phone a moment...." time.
I wouldn't be half surprised if some of them (Ford comes to mind) didn't dive into EV's headlong just
to prove the point - that the car-buying public doesn't want them - to those putting pressure upon them.
 
Please do feel free to offer any tangible proof of your assertations then.

Corporations sometimes will cow to the will of governments, especially if beholden to them (bailouts, etc.)
- but we all know in a capitalistic society, eventually they all return home to roost at the feet of profits.
Government mandates
aside, they ultimately have stockholders to answer to, as always - and corporations are
most interested in what will sell the most in the near-term, again due to the pressures of their
overlords.

It's why we see many of them now backing away from pure electric vehicles - they offered, the sales
weren't nearly what they wanted, so now it's "hold the phone a moment...." time.
I wouldn't be half surprised if some of them (Ford comes to mind) didn't dive into EV's headlong just
to prove the point - that the car-buying public doesn't want them - to those putting pressure upon them.
I can't do that in this section for sure.
I think we need to agree to disagree here my good sir, for the sake of keeping the thread out of the weeds.
I can say, I have long believed the most extreme group of people pushing EV(and other stuff) will eventually come to clash with their "allies" that just want to make lots of money. We can see this play out from the sidelines sometimes. I don't want to get into any more specifics then that, wrong place for it.
 
They all had those issues,the trans in the Mustangs were junk too. It took until the modern retro cars until they had drivelines that could handle horsepower!
I had forgotten about these. Not cheap, and certainly low production. Ed Hamburger, a Mopar guy in the 70’s… specifically 340 and other small blocks. He started an oil pan business, nice welded sheet aluminum pans with a center link tube. He started a new business, SLP… Street Legal Performance. He was somehow able to get his packages 50 state legal. If you remember back then, a lot of speed parts were not CARB approved for Cali. Anyway, here it is. The Fox Body killer.



Best part… it’s a stick car.
 
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