Man Maths: 1968 Dodge Charger 440 R/T

The plan was to find a rust-free California car (Arizona, Nevada or anywhere it barely ever rains would do), drive it back across the US to an East Coast port, bring it back the UK, make it famous by the all the stories we would write and sell it on, the profit realised paying for the whole trip and the price of importing the car. We’d done the numbers and, for once in this weird and wacky world of Man Maths, they actually seemed to add up. So why didn’t it happen?

We couldn’t find the right car. We weren’t being picky – it didn’t even have to be matching numbers as plenty of Chargers were upgraded to 440 spec long after they left the factory. I’d accepted it was likely to be automatic and that we’d probably not be able to find the famed ‘triple-black’ look (black paint, black roof, black interior) for our budget. All we wanted was a nice, clean car with a better than average chance of making it across the country without too many stops, apart from for fuel of which there’d clearly be plenty. But with gas at a buck a gallon back then, we weren’t even too bothered about that.

But the Chargers we found fitted entirely into one of two categories: pristine show queens we couldn’t afford and total basket cases unlikely to make it out of their yard, let alone across even one state border. And I blame the producers of The Dukes of Hazzard who managed to get through an estimated 300 Chargers (cosmetically adjusted to look like ’69s) during the creation of the show.

We gave up. But my love for the ’68 remains undiminished and not helped by having two friends who own them. The driving experience is dominated by the sound of that engine and the length of that wheelbase. ‘Agile’ is not a word that sits very comfortably in the same sentence but, like most fundamentally well-engineered American cars of the era, so long as you learn how to drive them, they are both quicker and far more rewarding than their outlandish proportions might suggest. And that 7.2-litre engine has the best woofle in the world, better – whisper it – even than the harder-edged sound of the Hemi.

But this is the boring bit: even if I found the right car and could afford it, I’m not sure what I’d do with it. It’s not a pub car, it’s a long distance machine and when I do those I almost always have to be in something else. I’m not even sure it’d fit in my shed. But what’s really annoying is that while there now seem to be plenty of the right kind of examples in the US, clean, non-matching numbers seem now to be around the $80-90,000 mark. So I might just call up my friends instead and ask if I can have a go in theirs. Angus, Jonny, what say you?

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