Can’t get enough of this car? Check out the website below for more pictures of it sitting in a showroom in Sydney. The price? About $370,000 Canadian at the current exchange rate. https://www.australianmusclecarsales.com.au/cars/1972-vh-e49-valiant-charger-rt-big-tank-244222
It’s always windy, never scenic, and takes forever. There’s one worse thing, though, and that’s stopping for fuel. Often, the pumps are on a service road off the highway, so you have to find your way off the road and back onto it afterwards. If you need premium gas, you might have to do this several times. Sometimes there’s a waiting line, or a pump is down. Those pay-at-the-pump machines seem handy until they won’t accept your card or the receipt roll is out of paper. More often than not, I have to go inside to get the receipt afterwards, and one time, when adding up my fuel economy (or lack thereof) once home, I had a bunch of receipts for sixty-ish litres of fuel and one for cigarettes and beef jerky. Apparently, I should have asked for MY receipt…
When driving an old vehicle, many of them get two-to-three hours of travel time at best to a tank of fuel, so stopping is a common occurrence. When I buy something, I generally like to have at least fifteen-to-twenty gallons of fuel capacity. I had a truck that held fifteen, but it also held a full five-gallon jug at all times, just in case. Stopping for fuel will always be a part of my life, as I won’t go easily towards the electric car, but with something like this 1972 Chrysler Valiant Charger R/T E49 A84 Track Pack, I’d have to stop a whole lot less often.
Australia has some of the coolest cars, or maybe they just seem cool because they’re so much different than the ones we have here. Take this 1972 Valiant Charger, for example. It’s one of only one-hundred and forty-nine units produced with the E49 R/T package. What that included was a 4.3-litre inline-six engine with three side-draft Weber carburetors putting out a respectable three-hundred and two horsepower. Not only did it have three carburetors, it also came with three pedals so you could row your own gears via a Borg Warner four-speed manual transmission. Sixty miles-per-hour was only a hair over six seconds away from a standstill, and a quarter-mile could be covered in just a hair over fourteen seconds. Out of those already limited R/T cars, a mere twenty-one units came with the A84 Track Pack. It added heavier wheel hubs, heavier brakes, 16:1 steering box, fourteen-inch slot alloy wheels, and a big gas tank. How big is big? Thirty-five gallons, or one-hundred and thirty-two and a half litres to save you the conversion. That’s so big, that the cars are known as “Big Tank” cars. So big that the tank takes up half the trunk space, almost touching the underside of the decklid. So big that the spare tire stands vertically behind it, dead center by the trunk latch. A fuel stop on an empty tank would certainly be felt in the bank account with a car like that, but luckily you wouldn’t have to make that many of them.
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