Unless you’ve been huddling in the cave with Osama for the past three years, you’re likely aware that a growing number of American performance cars aren’t cars anymore. The evolution of the American pickup from compost hauler to luxuriant macho conveyance to lifestyle statement has come full circle. In many cases, pickups aren’t for hauling anything anymore, except maybe your ego or your id.
Or, in this case, they’re just for hauling, period. The General Motors F-bodies are in the dust heap of history alongside Marxism, the new Pontiac GTO has been trickling out of dealer inventories like chilled molasses, Ford Mustang’s being reborn as 1969 all over again, and the Dodge Charger’s coming back as-well, we’re still not sure. This much, however, is indisputable. The world of American muscle can today claim a cargo bed as part of its identity as surely as the old big engine/midsize body combination.
Chevrolet and Ford sold their share of El Caminos and Rancheros equipped with big-blocks and four-speeds back in the glory years. And there’s more: At the beginning of the Seventies, you could order a half-ton Chevy C-10 pickup with the Custom Sport Truck or Cheyenne trim packages, the latter being a successor to the Cameo, or its GMC Custom Cab twin, equipped with the 402-cu.in., 300hp big-block and a full raft of luxury items including air conditioning. These were likely the first American light trucks to combine appearance, comfort and stout performance in a single package, predating the muscle truck phenomenon by some 30 years.
That trend began in earnest in 1977, when Chrysler introduced the Warlock, based on the second-generation Dodge D100 half-ton pickup, as a factory custom package. It was followed for 1978 by the wild-looking Li’l Red Express Truck in bright crimson, with chromed wheels, graphics, wood trim and twin vertical exhaust stacks that could have been lifted from a Freightliner cabover. Both trucks came with the 360-cu.in. small-block V-8, which, despite having only 160 desmogged horsepower, propelled one of them to the fastest 0-100 mph clocking of any 1978 domestic vehicle in a Car and Driver test.
Things got more serious in 1990, when Chevy dropped its big-block, despite having only 230hp, into a short-bed C1500 pickup and dubbed it the SS 454. It didn’t go unnoticed by the competition. In mid-1993, Ford’s Special Vehicles Team created the F-150 Lightning, an answer of sorts to the SS 454 based on a short-bed chassis, and loaded with the 351-cu.in. Windsor V-8 mated to a four-speed overdrive automatic. It, and the all-wheel-drive, potently turbocharged GMC Syclone and Typhoon formed a partial blueprint for the performance trucks that followed from Ford and DaimlerChrysler.
The second-generation SVT F-150 Lightning and the outrageous Dodge Ram SRT-10 represent the epitome of today’s performance truck. The Lightning’s all grown up now, with a supercharged, intercooled variant of Ford’s modular Triton truck engine. Still, for sheer chutzpah and thrust, it’s tough to top the Ram SRT-10, which followed Dodge’s gaggle of Hemi-powered trucks and SUVs onto the market for 2004, armed to the teeth with its Viper-derived 505-cu.in. V-10 channeled through a six-speed manual transmission.
We wanted to answer two questions in this story: Can the performance trucks take the measure of a traditional muscle car, and do their owners consider them legitimate heirs to America’s go-fast heritage? To find out, we gathered a clutch of cars and trucks, and gave them several chances to run and record their best quarter-mile times. All of the vehicles were stock and raced on street tires, with no drag radials or slicks allowed. They used stock exhausts and unleaded fuel. All were weighed including driver and fuel load. Those weights were used to calculate their comparative power-to-weight ratios, so we could arrive at meaningful matchups. Not only that, we also did our research and came up with a few hypothetic pairings, just to make things interesting. The track retained enough heat and rubber for acceptable off-the-line bite, in most cases.
So, after all this sizzled rubber, what conclusions can we draw? As George Tenet said before he lost his job at the CIA, it’s a slam dunk: Performance trucks are exciting, fully deserving of their muscle labeling, clearly growing in numbers and, barring a fuel crisis, likely here to stay.
1977 Pontiac Trans Am Special Edition vs. 1979 Dodge L’il Red Express Truck
The genesis of this story was the same thing that’s inspired many others around here: Good-natured bantering in the Hemmings editorial department, which can cover any number of automotive topics. In this case, we were jawboning about a Ram SRT-10 from the DaimlerChrysler media fleet that had been in our hands recently. Then, as if by providence, we learned about the two California-based vehicles that grace this month’s cover, the Li’l Red Express Truck and black-on-gold Pontiac Trans Am, and started discussing the performance capabilities of cars and trucks in earnest. Then we popped the notion of doing a story that compared cars and trucks with hot engines, and to paraphrase Robert Kennedy, asked ourselves, “Why not?”
The cover twins are both carefully restored, something rarely seen among performance cars from the late Seventies, at least for the moment. The black Special Edition Trans Am, a car that Bruce Springsteen would later immortalize in the lyrics to Cadillac Ranch, belongs to Ben Stewart of Malibu, California, and exists both as a specialty Firebird and an umbilical to his adolescent years.
“When I was growing up, my father took me to see Smokey and the Bandit, and after seeing it, I fell in love with the Trans Am,” he said. “I have to admit that I didn’t know that the late-Seventies Trans Ams weren’t all that fast, compared to the muscle cars of the Sixties, but regardless, that was my childhood view of what a muscle car was.”
As an adult, he never lost his longing for one of these Burt Reynolds cars. It took him a long time of browsing through the classifieds in Hemmings Motor News before he found what he wanted, explaining that, “I was very specific about what I wanted to buy. I wanted a 1978 with the L72 engine option, which gave you 220hp instead of the regular Trans Am’s 200, plus the WS6 performance suspension package was a new option that year. There were two types of T-top hatches back then, and I was lucky that this was a Hurst-hatch car, before they switched over to Fisher Body (as a running change in 1978). I think the Hurst hatches just look cooler; the bar in the center is fatter.”
He paid $4,000 to an Arizona seller for the Trans Am, and spent several years correcting chronic oil leaks and replacing suspension components. The engine’s also been bored .030 over, so the actual horsepower is probably a little better than stock. When it came to being matched up against a Li’l Red Express Truck-or for that matter, discussing the fact that performance trucks exist at all-Stewart applied some historical perspective.
“I’m really not surprised they did it, because if you think back, truckin’ was really popular in the Seventies, not only as a word but as a lifestyle,” he said. “You have B.J. and the Bear on TV, Movin’ On on TV and Convoy on the radio, plus all the CB lingo. It was like country or being a rebel was the thing to do. Plus, the Express Truck was the quickest thing out there. It was quicker than a Lamborghini from those years.”
The cover truck, owned by Steve Stanley of Costa Mesa, California, was, in his view, a tip of the hat to practicality, as well as Chrysler performance history. As he explained to us, “I’ve been into Mopars all my life, but I’m 6 foot 5, and I couldn’t fit into the ‘Cudas and Challengers. I just wasn’t comfortable. So when this came along, I thought it was great. This one is my second Li’l Red Express Truck. What happened to the first one was, I had just gotten done restoring it and was out driving it, and all of sudden a kid ran out in front of me. It was either hit the kid or hit the line of parked cars, so I picked the cars.”
When he got his second Li’l Red, a 1978-which wasn’t sold in California because, he said, “Chrysler was thumbing their nose at the smog laws”-Stanley embarked upon yet another restoration, with an unexpectedly easy source of parts. Stanley told us, “The military was using Dodge trucks back then, and there was a ton of Army surplus parts all over the place; gauges, gaskets, switches, body parts. If some base got 10 trucks, they’d have enough spare parts to fix a thousand of them.”
At our track test, we got another neat restoration tale. Bill Youngberg of Newburgh, New York, guessed his 1979 Li’l Red Express Truck, an older restoration, would likely turn 15.7s, and he was very nearly on the money.
“I’ve had it 13 years, bought it locally,” he said. “I had a Z28 back in the Eighties and hated it; it ran O.K. but was always breaking. I wanted a truck so I could carry stuff for the other cars I own, but I also wanted some guts and this has them. I know it’s a 20-footer, and the whole truck needs to be redone, but I won my class with it at the Mopar Nationals at Englishtown. That was the best day of my life.”
Youngberg faced Kent Fuller of Ravena, New York-no relation to the Sixties dragster builder-and his award-winning 1977 Pontiac Special Edition Trans Am, a fully documented car in black and gold, and, like Stewart’s car, it’s one of the few built with Hurst-installed T-tops before GM took those installations in-house. It also has a Hurst-shifted Muncie M21 four-speed, and, as he put it, “I always loved these cars. When I first got this one, it was nothing. The only thing that’s not stock is the stereo and the Flowmasters, because I like a nice little rumble.” Fuller’s car brought hardware back from the recent Trans Am Nationals, and he was trying to be gentle with its clutch on the multiple launches, hence his somewhat leisurely elapsed time. But he added, “For years, nobody respected these second-generation Firebirds, nobody wanted them, and now, I think they’re finally coming back.”
Stanley agreed that the oft-ridiculed late-Seventies performance cars of all sorts are making a comeback and finally earning a measure of respectability. He recalled, “I never even saw one of these things until the middle of 1978. I had a Six-Pack Challenger T/A and the truck could hold its own with it. Anything that could turn 15.5s in the late Seventies was a fast vehicle. I also once had a Midnight Express truck with a 440-remember those?-and the 360 truck was quicker. This truck came out of Missouri, and when I got it, it was just a run-down Li’l Red Truck. But the guy I bought it from, he’d earlier had an agreement to sell it to a guy from Japan, but then the Japanese economy reversed and the deal fell through. So I like to tell people I actually saved this one from being exported.”
Specifications
