You’re looking here at something that doesn’t happen all that often in my carefully planned fleet construction: a complete accident. This bright yellow Charger isn’t supposed to exist, but here it is. Believe me when I tell you, that same kind of scenario happened back in the day in Detroit once in a while too, so it’s not without precedent, but in a nutshell: I bought what I thought was an Auto World body mounted on an original Aurora chassis with the intention of using the chassis on another car and trading the body to a local slothead for something he had that I wanted. When it arrived, it turned that what I wanted to trade for was no longer available, but also by that time, I had found another chassis to mount on the body I wanted the chassis from this car for…so I had a full car I didn’t intend to own. It was briefly added to The Road Crew, though due to being just a hair larger than the original Aurora version it is copied from-and thus, just a hair too large- I didn’t intend for this to be a permanent situation. I nonetheless remounted it on the fastest original Aurora chassis I have built to date, using it primarily as a test car for the different types of tires I was buying for my Aurora originals (see the entry “Nu Shooz: Tire Options for Original Thunderjets,” Aug 28 2021). Once that experiment was finished, I swapped a bunch of stuff around again (by this time yet more bodies and chassis had arrived!) and so I was finally left with a body I didn’t know what to do with.
But what a body it was! I had never seen the AW Charger in this color combo before! At first I thought it was a rare early release, until research revealed it wasn’t quite an Auto World issue, but rather one of the Johnny Lightning body-only releases from around 1999-2000; the ones sold on the pullback chassis before Auto World started making their own T-jet 500 revival series. That explained its origins, but it still didn’t explain what I was going to do with it.
“So,…OK, I have a few spare Ultra-G chassis lying around and one last set of Vincent Torque Thrusts in cold storage, so let’s build it as a muscle car fleet member, even though I don’t need any more fleet members.”
Man, did I get more than I bargained for!
I threw it together within the space of an hour and dropped it on the track just to see what it could do. By the time I’d completed 5 laps-in near record time!-my mouth fell open. Wait a minute, this was a used chassis, a take-off from another car with no performance upgrades, and clipped and ground reused axles and even slightly used tires to boot! How could it have performed like that? I reset the timer and did it again…it clocked just a hair over 30 second for 5 laps. That put it in the top quarter of performance figures for the entire fleet!
Ohhhhkay, so I often spend hours and hours building, testing, and tuning brand new chassis to get them up to scratch without seeing these kinds of numbers, and then I throw this together from spare parts in a hour and get this! Well, again, this is not without precedent: you may have read an older entry on my “junkyard Cheetah” in the numbered racing fleet (“Rat Rod Racer! Built From Scratch, Built From Scrap,” Jan 24 2021) that had similar results; so this is now the second time this unlikely scenario has occurred.
Considering this whole series of events, this “accidental car” seems like it was meant to be! Trouble is, there’s no place for it; the Muscle Car Fleet is complete, and even with a couple of recent moves and a couple more planned, I don’t have a place for this car, leaving me to wonder what I’m going to do with it! It seems a shame to leave such a good looking car that’s also such a hot performer out in the cold. Could it be that it becomes an outlaw, a mercenary racer looking for a place to jump into a tournament if a scheduled car goes out with mechanical problems? Hard to say, so for now, the “Rumble Bee”* waits around a corner, 426 Hemi running, for an opportunity to launch.
* Yeah, I know there’s a 2000’s Dodge Ram truck called that, but c’mon, look at this thing; with this color combo, what else could I call it???
Indeed, there is nothing else you could call it! That is quite the story of how it came into being! I like hearing these tales of the unexpected where there is a happy ending. You always need “spares” for the muscle car fleet right?