A couple posts back I wrote on my chance meeting with the Maserati – Chrysler TC Club….no it’s fine go back and look…we’ll wait. (Insert whistling sound.) One response mentioned that the Maserati/ Chrysler TC was …”two years late to market.” (Bill February 10, 2014 at 12:00 PM).
That didn’t occur to me about the TC but I had just finished reading an article in Hemmings Motor News the Muscle Car Profile section – 1969 Plymouth Baracuda 383. It was written by Terry McGean.
The article chats about the 383 and the Formula S package. But the article starts out by saying That Chrysler peeps are pretty sure they started the “pony” car craze by revamping the Valiant line of cars to come up with the Baracuda just before Ford released the Mustang. And that is the case but unfortunately the A-body wasn’t up to par with the Mustang and the Camaro in the performance department and both cars left the Valiant platform in the dust or as Terry wrote “…Ford mastered the art of re-skinning an economy model as a sporting coup, or else these cars would have been called ‘Fish cars’…(I’m inserting a chuckle here.)…From there Plymouth seemed to be chasing the Mustang and not long after the Camaro and Firebird twins.”
This ties in to what I thought about when Mother Mopar came out with the Charger. It was a horrible attempt at recapturing the ‘pony’ car era. Ford had already re-invented the Mustang buy then and Chevy gave the C6 Corvette a retro ’60’s style shape and then came the Camaro and still Chrysler didn’t have the answer, until the Challenger. That was nicely done and I love it, but it was still late to the party again.
I thought they might make a hit with the ‘Dodge Dart’, I considered that a pony car of sorts, but instead we got a Dodge Neon.
’65 Cuda
’65 Mustang
’65 Camaro
Thanks for reading.
Tim
