Ever tried to overtake a ’68 Charger on a British B-road… while driving another ’68 Charger? There isn’t a lot of wiggle room. You become conscious of the steering, which is designed to make an easy job of manoeuvring a large car at lower speeds, but not really suited to placing it with inch-perfect accuracy. Trees and hedges bear down from one side and the graceful flanks of the other car seem close enough to swap paint − but if we can just hold it for a moment or two – yes, our photographer has his shot.
One of the things that’s both a pleasure and a pain about owning American classics in the UK is that they’re just not built for our conditions. It’s a pleasure because it makes American cars stand out so much from their European counterparts, which used to be built to a different scale. In this age of hulking great SUVs, there’s less of a difference, but attend a classic car show and you still feel like you’ve brought a Dinky toy to a Matchbox convention. It can be a pain when the parking spaces are too small, the lanes are too narrow and the turns are too tight, but we manage to live with it.
We tend to do it in different ways, though, and these two Chargers are examples of that. One of them is a small-block car, preferred because it’s
