1971 Plymouth Road Runner Emerges From Storage Looking Amazing
Orange 1971 Plymouth Road Runner sure doesn’t look like it’s been stored for the last 30 years.
The Plymouth Road Runner is a legendary vehicle in the realm of the muscle car era, a special machine built during a highly-competitive time in the automotive world when automakers were constantly trying to one-up each other on the track and the street. This was a cutthroat time for automakers, of course, but also a glorious time for car fanatics, who could cruise down to one of many local dealerships and purchase a seriously fast, awesome muscle car right off the lot and go racing. Today, we can sort of do the same thing, but we’d rather have this 1971 Plymouth Road Runner that recently emerged from storage and went up for grabs on eBay.
What’s particularly amazing about this 1971 Plymouth Road Runner is that it was in storage for a whopping 30 years, yet looks no worse for wear today. Generally, cars that have been stored that long are rusty, with rat-induced damage everywhere, but that certainly isn’t the case here. This is also a numbers-matching example that isn’t exactly what one might consider rare, but it’s a super cool barn find nonetheless.
Plymouth produced a grand total of 14,218 Road Runners in 1971, of which 11,700 were fitted with the automaker’s 383 cubic-inch V8. Most collectors go for the Hemi-powered version, which was produced in tiny numbers (just 27 came with an automatic transmission) and obviously carries a lot more name value. But that didn’t stop someone from paying a healthy $60k for this very nice, if not terribly rare Road Runner.
On top of all this, 1971 was also the beginning of the end for the Road Runner and muscle cars in general, prior to the great horsepower crash of the later 1970s. This was the last year for both the 426 Hemi and 440+6, while the 383 was detuned a bit with an 8.7:1 compression ratio and “only” 300 horsepower. However, this also ensured that the car could run on regular gas and didn’t carry heavy premium insurance rates, which was a plus.
Things got dark from there, of course, as the Road Runner continued to lose power due to tightening emissions regulations, so one could argue that the 1971 model was the end of an era. And we can’t think of a better tribute to that than this incredibly well-preserved example.
Photos: eBay
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