Dodge, Chrysler and the Petersen Automotive Museum go cruising
There was a lot to celebrate: Cool cars, a police escort, the 60th anniversary of the Dodge Charger, the 100th anniversary of Route 66, and the 250th anniversary of the United States of America.
The Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles did it all last Sunday with a lineup of some of its cars, some of Dodge/Chrysler’s cars, and a bunch of cars that belonged to friends and fans of the beloved automotive institution. I did my part by piloting a brand new Dodge Charger R/T Four-Door AWD, one of the last of the great muscle cars that defined the brand.
Mine had the 3.0-liter twin turbo straight-six that Dodge likes to call the Hurricane. It sure was, not just because it had torque all over the tach, especially down low when your foot got anywhere near the accelerator, but because the eight-speed automatic was tuned to sense when you wanted to do something and had it in the right gear every time. How it did this I don’t know, it just did.
It even went around corners without flopping over on its door handles like muscle cars of yore used to do. But that was just one car in a parade that rolled down Olympic Blvd. like a celebration of the USA, of the Mother Road, and of all things fun and horsepowered. Click on to pick your favorites. This car won America’s Most Beautiful Roadster in 2018.
“It is so much fun to drive,” Martin said with a grin wider than the increased track width on his ‘31. Bryce Menzies is one of the winningest drivers in SCORE Desert Racing. He’s won the Baja 400, 500 and 1000 in this truck. It was quite a scene to see and hear it roaring up the ramp in the Petersen’s parking garage.
You can root for him in the Baja 400 Sept. 9-13 and the Baja 1000 Nov. 9-15. Mark Vaughn grew up in a Ford family and spent many hours holding a trouble light over a straight-six miraculously fed by a single-barrel carburetor while his father cursed the Blue Oval, all its products and everyone who ever worked there. This was his introduction to objective automotive criticism.
He started writing for City News Service in Los Angeles, then moved to Europe and became editor of a car magazine called, creatively, Auto. He decided Auto should cover Formula 1, sports prototypes and touring cars—no one stopped him! From there he interviewed with Autoweek at the 1989 Frankfurt motor show and has been with us ever since.
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