FiestaST
Honorary Master
The Black Ghost is the Dodge Challenger’s penultimate goodbye
Second-to-last Challenger revives a Detroit street-racing legend
Now that the ‘new’ Challenger is now just one more step away from its last goodbye, it’s probably worth distilling what made it such a desirable thing in the first place. There’s any number of reasons, of course – affordable muscle, the warm glow of Made in Murica and so on. But in a nutshell, it’s because it was so much like the old one.
And the penultimate ‘Last Call’ Challenger rather doubles down on that score. It’s a callback to the original ‘Black Ghost’ of the Seventies, and includes graphics that hark back to the ‘gator skin’ pattern roof vinyl, as well as the vintage-correct white tail stripes and script Challenger logo.
And while these Proustian visual cues are all well and good, nostalgia by itself is a façade as empty as a Potemkin village. To truly work as a modern interpretation of the original, it needs to show the same spirit as the original.
So what was the original Black Ghost about? Well, it was a black-on-black (naturally), Hemi-powered Challenger, with an officially rated 425bhp that was a... generous understatement. Somewhere around 470bhp was probably closer to the mark, meaning an old, loping, 7.0-litre pushrod V8 from 1970 was capable of more than one horsepower per cubic centimetre – nothing to sniff at half a century ago.
www.topgear.com
Second-to-last Challenger revives a Detroit street-racing legend
Now that the ‘new’ Challenger is now just one more step away from its last goodbye, it’s probably worth distilling what made it such a desirable thing in the first place. There’s any number of reasons, of course – affordable muscle, the warm glow of Made in Murica and so on. But in a nutshell, it’s because it was so much like the old one.
And the penultimate ‘Last Call’ Challenger rather doubles down on that score. It’s a callback to the original ‘Black Ghost’ of the Seventies, and includes graphics that hark back to the ‘gator skin’ pattern roof vinyl, as well as the vintage-correct white tail stripes and script Challenger logo.
And while these Proustian visual cues are all well and good, nostalgia by itself is a façade as empty as a Potemkin village. To truly work as a modern interpretation of the original, it needs to show the same spirit as the original.
So what was the original Black Ghost about? Well, it was a black-on-black (naturally), Hemi-powered Challenger, with an officially rated 425bhp that was a... generous understatement. Somewhere around 470bhp was probably closer to the mark, meaning an old, loping, 7.0-litre pushrod V8 from 1970 was capable of more than one horsepower per cubic centimetre – nothing to sniff at half a century ago.
The Black Ghost is the Dodge Challenger’s penultimate goodbye
Second-to-last Challenger revives a Detroit street-racing legend
