84: REAL DEAL
— HEMI-PACKING ROAD RUNNER
Between them, the Davy family have owned so many Chryslers that you’d think they had some kind of a back-door deal with the factory. Sadly for them, that’s not true, and they’ve had to pay for their cars the good old-fashioned way — through hard work; determination; and, in the case of cars like their 1969 Road Runner, keeping an ear to the ground. The Mopar underground network can be a tough one to get into — those with desirable cars don’t just tend to chuck them up for sale online. You’ve got to be in the loop and known to be a genuine buyer before you’ll get a look in. That was the situation that brothers Gene and Craig Davy found themselves in. Having owned a plethora of Chryslers, both from Australian and US factories, including a pair of Super Bees, a Coronet, and a Cuda, they were on the hunt for something even more special. The grapevine led the brothers to an equally obsessed Mopar addict by the name of Matt Gibbons. Now, those who know Matt know
that he’s got damn good taste in cars, but, more than that, he’s not afraid to use them as they were intended. If a car rolled off the production line with a drag pack, then Matt would race it. Mind you, he did manage to get his hands on some valuable machines, including a Dodge Daytona, well before they were considered desirable or as expensive as they are today. Maybe this is why he’s well known, even to this day, for blasting the Daytona up and down the Hutt motorway just north of Wellington at all hours of the day, despite having sold the car a couple of decades ago. It wasn’t just for stores of full-throttle Daytona driving that Gene and Craig got in touch with Matt, though. It was because they knew he had a 1969 Road Runner 426 four-speed — that magic ‘426’ number being the holy grail of Mopar engines and rarer than a steaming pile of rocking-horse shit, especially when mated to a four-speed box and within the matchingnumbers vehicle body. Matt had owned the car for some years, and, to be fair, for the last 10 or 15 of those, it had sat idle, almost unknown, aside from those who … well, were in the know. Prior to tucking it away, Matt was a regular on the dragstrip with the car, adding a heavy-duty clutch and flywheel to it, along with a scatter shield in case the worst should happen. It wasn’t just local drag events that Matt raced at; he also raced the car at Mission Raceway in Canada when he lived overseas, as well as competing in flying-mile events here in New Zealand in
the 1980s. So, with this in mind, a set of custom headers had been created for it to let the elephant motor breathe more easily, and an oil accumulator was added to help keep the oil where it should be. The brothers fell in love with the car at first sight, even if the original Sunfire Yellow paint did have a couple of blemishes in it. And, while Matt was keen to sell it, letting go of such a genuine treasure still took him a bit of time to come to terms with before agreeing to the deal. “We knew being a 426 Hemi four-speed car, it was our holy grail, it couldn’t get any better,” Gene reminisces of the purchase. Once the deal went through, it’d take a bit more time for them to get together with mate Rodney Holland and a decent trailer to make the trip from Auckland to collect it — sure, driving the car home would have been nice, but with a genuine 38,000 miles on the clock from new, and after sitting for so long, it’s more suited to local drives. Once home, the guys set about replacing worn-out bushes and generally giving the car a once-over without changing anything that would affect its value. The original red-walled F70X15 cross-ply tyres — the high-performance tyre option of the day — were pulled off and put into storage, while a set of similar looking radials was fitted in their place. This tyre option was marked on the car from the
“being a 426 Hemi four-speed car, it was our holy grail”
production line, on the inside of the trunk lid — a scribble that remains to this day. The car also runs all of the Hemi Track Pak options, such as a larger radiator up front, bash plate below the big motor, and torque boxes to help transfer the engine’s power to the rear end. The rear end itself is a Dana 60 with Sure-Grip head — as good as it got back in 1969. The Hemi cars also received different suspension to their lesser specced siblings, with Track Pak springs in the rear and heavy-duty torsion bars up front to help take the weight of the massive motors, if nothing else. The combination was a successful one for Chrysler. The legendary 426 Hemi went on to become the motor of choice for drag racers who wanted to win — the engines became the basis for the Top Fuel engines we know and love today. Sure, this one’s not that wild, but, with a pair of four-barrel carbs up top, it produced 425hp off the showroom floor — that’s big power by today’s standards, let alone 1969’s. Of course, the Road Runner was built to be lightweight too, without some of the luxury items of the GTX, with which it shares its platform. These days, the cross-ply tyres only go on for show, as does the air-grabber bonnet. The rest of the time, they sit and wait for potential day that the brothers decide to ensure that the car’s exactly as it was when it came off the production line. But, for now, in the words of the brothers, “The car can really get on it, so we are just happy to leave it as it is and just lay down some rubber and miles in it.”