How surprising?

Spam Hater wrote: a corner, however, and ghosts of long ago Chargers

What a load of crap.. The original Charger was actually a *good* handler for its day, and with less than $200 of urethane bushings and sway-bar upgrades (not counting modern radial tires) a '69 Charger can be made into a good handler by *today's* standards. The crap above is what you get when twerps who weren't even alive in '69 get the misguided impression that they actually know something about a car they've likely never even sat in, let alone driven.

I'll say one thing for John Matras; he's a simile man. Bigtime. He's been to picturesque writing classes more times than a two-year olds pajamas go in the laundry. He was making up word pictures like a single girl in her 30's making up cookies for a college football team. Reading it was about as much fun as eating a 50 pound bag of sugar. One simile would have been as adequate as a 500 pound doorstop.

Read the whole article. I couldn't take anything in it seriously.

I'm sure he's refering to the stock car. Sure we know that suspension changes can greatly improve things. I was there in '69 and American '69 cars were terrible at handling. I had a '63 Chev II which was also good- at handling, but was quite a bit better when I did mods similar to what you mentioned. But it certainly wasn't stock then, was it?

Replacing bushings hardly counts as a "change." No geometry is altered at all. The biggest difference is just putting sticky tires on. And a few of the cars did get ordered with all the sway bars stock, but far too many didn't since they weren't standard equipment.

So was I, and I disagree completely. The popular GMs (Cutlass, Monte Carlo, Grand Prix, 442, etc) wallowed like pigs in slop, and that's what everyone remembers. Mopar A- and B- bodies handled MUCH differently from other American cars.

I had a 71 Dodge Dart Swinger and my sister had an older 4 door Plymouth. I can't remember anything good about their handling and the Swinger was so loud on the highway you had to scream at each other to be heard over the road noise. I prefer to forget the so-called good old days. The leaf springs on the Dart didn't last. The disk brakes froze up in Rochester road salt.

I doubt the accuracy of your memory, then.

I prefer to forget the so-called good old days.

Your loss. I'll be driving a 60s or 70s Mopar as long as cars are allowed to run on gasoline.