"Doing local car shows and cruises was becoming a bore . . . this is a musclecar, and I think a lot of people forget that and why they have that name. These cars were built to race, not just to sit, cruise, or be trailer queens."
So says Kevin Haranczak, the owner of this immaculate GY1 Curious Yellow '71 440 Six Pack Road Runner that placed Second in a field of 32 entries at the 2000 Detroit Autorama.
Thirty-year-old Kevin and his dad, Don, maintain an eyebrow-raising fleet of hairy Mopars at their Warren, Michigan, digs. These include a '70 'Cuda 383 four-speed, a '70 Charger 500, a '70 340 Duster, a '77 Aspen R/T, and an '87 Charger GLHS. No clones here. This Road Runner is the real deal-not some gussied-up Satellite.
The car, minus the driveline, was purchased in 1990. The interesting thing was somewhere down the line, the original Six Pack engine was removed and replaced with a Hemi.
"For a $20,000 [asking price] car, it needed a lot of work," says Kevin. "Back when I bought it, Hemis were more expensive than they are now; they were really up there before the [MP replacement] blocks came out," said Kevin. Instead of dropping 20 Gs, Kevin walked off with the rolling chassis for a slightly more reasonable $6,500. "It was a Kentucky car," he says, "so there was nothing major going on with the body, and no panels had been replaced. What it did have, however, was an old-fashioned trailer hitch that had been welded to the framerails and drilled into the bumper. Whoever did it was pretty crude about putting it on."
Kevin was a teenager when he bought the Road Runner, and as a young man, his attention naturally wandered toward other interests. Kevin placed the car on hiatus for the next 10 years, only to revive it a decade later-this time with a full-blown resto on the menu.
The 440 block, born the day after Christmas in 1970, received a .030 overbore, along with a fresh set of Diamond flat-top pistons and Eagle rods attached to a stock stroke crank. This, along with the 906-casting heads, creates a pleasing 11:1 compression. The valve openings were enlarged to 2.18/1.88 and have been treated to a full port job. The Six Pack intake features a trio of Holley two-barrel carbs (jetted 78 front and rear, 62 center) fed by a Carter high-volume fuel pump. The cam is a Crane roller unit measuring 226/230 degrees duration at .050. The lift is one of those "racing secrets," installed in the block, four degrees retarded. Kevin reports 400 hp at 5,200 rpm and 430 lb-ft of torque at 4,500 rpm.