CapSat 6

A 1974 Roadrunner with manual steering and an powerless 318. What a combination; slow and uncomfortable. Too funny, Bob! You forgot "dumpy looking" (with no stripes). Although I would call an old 318 average- slow was the slant-6 '67 Coronet I owned briefly.

As an aside, I went to look at a 1:1 '74 Road Runner for sale about 20 years ago. This was back when old muscle cars might still be sitting on the street once in awhile. It was pretty original- worn, original-looking red paint, no stripes (just Road Runner emblems in the right places), standard bulge hood, black bench seat interior, a 318/ auto, and NO power steering. The VIN checked out- making it a genuine Road Runner. One test drive convinced me not to buy it. It was in good shape and ran well, but that manual steering in a 4,000 lb. car was a real bear. I had a driver with manual brakes years before and that was much easier to live with. I guess I could have swapped power steering in, but at the time I didn't feel there was anything else special about the car so it wasn't worth the effort to me. Nowadays, you don't see many old muscle cars, (especially Mopars) without stripes, with bench seats, or base engines (base in the RR was a 383 in '68, but just a few short years later, the base mill was actually the bread-and-butter 318). I think I'm going to have to build a model of that car.

I took a look at the kits that I have: correct- the 80's issues (orange on box, molded in orange), and the later RC2 issues (red on box/ molded in gray) all have the single exhaust / catalytic converter chassis, and later '75-'79 B Body dash. I guess I was so used to these features because I grew up with the '80's issue. No Cragar wheels or stock stripes come with these kits like are shown on the red car boxes- the custom wheels are later modular Centerline/ SST style wheels. They do all seem to come with stock Rallye wheels however- the gray plastic ones I have do have Rallyes on the chrome tree. The orange kits sometimes came with dark tinted windows, like many of the '80's MPC kits. The Dukes kits come with the correct dash and chassis plate, along with stock stripes in 3 colors, and it's molded in white, so that issue is looking better and better in comparison. You could do worse than to get one of the older kits, and combine it with the AMT '71 Charger R/T (for the Chassis, dashboard and powertrain) for added detail. Having the correct dash in the new kit gives me hope that maybe Round 2 they has the tooling for the '71 Road Runner- that has to be where the correct dash came from, it looks identical to the one in the '71 kits. It does appear that this tool shared common elements (chassis, some interior, engine, custom Cragar wheels) among the annual MPC '71-'74 Road Runners, then the '75-'76 Fury-based Road Runners, then finally with the MPC '77-'78 Monacos.

Look for a pre-Dukes release (known as a "74 GTX"). They issued these several times in the past 10 years. The only difference is that they did not come with decals for the stock graphics. My bet would be that you could find one of those much cheaper, get some aftermarket decals (Fred Cady or Firebird Designs) and still come out ahead of the current "ask" for the Dukes version.