I've driven an old muscle car with a 340 (Dad used to have a Road Runner), they have Plenty of bottom end torque! The 318 was pretty much just a people mover engine...... 340s never had a 2 bbl carb, they were strictly for high performance applications. The basic architecture of the 340 was used in the development of the Viper v10!
The only thing that (somewhat) keeps this Hornet from being unattractive is the fact that they tried to incorporate the Charger front end.......