![]() To skirt uniformity and tweak a few boundaries and paint the asphalt at a lonely intersection with double stripes.Īfter all, a car-loving boy only gets a 16th birthday once. It's hard to be discrete in a vivid purple muscle car.Īnd if I did roust a few of the locals, should I feel terrible about it? The entire point of the Challenger is to encourage a little bad behavior. I started taking different routes lest the nearest other neighbors (who didn't get invited) get annoyed. Pretty soon everyone had piled in for at least a loop around our backwoods roads-sometimes twice. Teenage boys and girls and their parents. Four passengers at a time, like a traveling carnival. I brought over the car in all its Plum Crazy arraignment-the loudest purple you've ever seen-and gave rides. My neighbor's son just turned 16, and he was having his birthday party. ![]() Later, in front of my wife, he said, "Dad, let's do another smoky burnout!" But shouldn't every little one learn a bit about rebellion inside a Challenger? First thing I did was take out my 3-and-a-half-year old son in his car seat. It is a bad 1970s detective TV show, walrus mustaches and all, writ into metal.Īnd while the size might work against it on a racetrack, in the real world you can stuff four or even five people into it. It is the realization that being in polite society often means bending, if just a little, in most situations. It is refusing to check your work e-mail after 5:30. It is telling your mom that's she's being annoying when she actually is. Being a few minutes late and not apologizing for it. Here's what the Challenger is: Cheating on your taxes (a little). The Challenger doesn't ride on rails, the car doesn't shrink around you the faster you go, and it doesn't feel all that planted. Tip-in most often results in the hood tipping upwards, and the philosophy is that traction is not a thing to be managed, but to be overcome. Try to manage the car over a technical off-camber turn, and it wallows like a drunken harbor seal. One doubts that the word "lightening" has ever been applied to the car, and its suspension, though improved with the Scat Pack's performance version, is workaday. The Challenger in any V8 form is husky and so nose-heavy that it feels like there's a Honda Civic sitting on the hood. But what it delivers is delightfully unfussy: the kind of visceral delights which got us into cars in the first place.īut let's start out with the things that the car is not. The Challenger I borrowed was the 392 Hemi Scat Pack Shaker, which is rather a fussy name come to think of it. The dickering over the weight balance and the merits of aero packages with carbon-fiber splitters, single-scroll turbos versus, well, whatever. It reminded me that, as much as we here at the magazine and website love cars, sometimes we get caught up in the fussy stuff. I just spent a week with a Dodge Challenger, and it helped me recalibrate some internal stuff.
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