Dodge Coronet 5th Gen

Two distinct bodies live inside these six model years. The 1965 car was upright and plain, a mildly reworked version of what Dodge had been building since 1963. For 1966 Chrysler's rectilinear house style arrived, all straight edges and a long scallop down the flank, and it is still the cleanest thing the nameplate ever wore. The 1968 restyle is the famous one: a coke-bottle B-body credited to Richard Sias and his team, double-diamond in profile with a scalloped door, given its own grille and quarters so it read as a Coronet and not a Charger. Sias's Coronet work was well enough received that pieces of it went into the 1968 Charger. On R/T and Super Bee cars a power-bulge hood carried simulated vents and dual bumblebee stripes wrapped the tail, both part of the Scat Pack campaign Dodge launched for 1968 behind a cartoon bee in goggles and a crash helmet. 1969 changed the grille and lamps only. For 1970 the nose became a twin-loop bumper, two chrome ovals split by a body-colour tongue, and it is the one styling decision on this car almost nobody defends. R/T sales fell by roughly two thirds that year.

The Coronet's racing life happened mostly on a drag strip, and it started before the street cars got interesting. For 1965 Dodge built the A990: a lightweight Coronet with acid-dipped panels, aluminium front sheet metal, no radio, no heater, lightweight seats, and a 12.5:1 426 Race Hemi hand-assembled at Chrysler's Marysville plant. Most sources give 101 Dodges, built at Lynch Road in January 1965 and carrying a WO serial prefix, though a few say 105. Then Chrysler went further. A batch of Coronets and Plymouth Belvederes, usually given as five of each, went to Amblewagon in Detroit, which moved the front wheels forward ten inches and the rear axle forward fifteen, leaving a 110-inch wheelbase and a silhouette that looks wrong from every angle. NHRA answered by capping A/FX wheelbase changes at two percent, banning the cars from the class they were built for. AHRA took them in as Ultra Stock and unsanctioned match racing took them everywhere else, and Dick Landy went 39 wins and one loss with his across the 1965 season. What those cars started became the funny car. In NASCAR the Coronet was Dodge's weapon before the fastback Charger arrived: David Pearson took the 1966 Grand National title for Cotton Owens with 15 wins, running Coronets early in the season.

The Coronet's fame belongs to Dodge's advertising more than to the car. It carried the Dodge Rebellion through 1966 and 1967, with Pamela Austin making around twenty commercials as the Dodge Rebellion Girl, menaced by sharks and falling off drawbridges and signing off every time with the line that the Dodge Rebellion wants you. Dodge dropped her after 1967 on the theory that she was overshadowing the cars. Then came the Scat Pack for 1968, launched with three models: the Charger R/T, the Dart GTS and the Coronet R/T. That campaign's helmeted cartoon bee is still on Dodge products. On screen the Coronet works almost entirely as scenery, which is its own kind of weight. A 1969 four-door is what Al Pacino and his accomplices drive to the bank at the start of Dog Day Afternoon, cast precisely because it is the most anonymous object on a Brooklyn street. Coronets fill the traffic and the police fleets of late-sixties American film and television the same way. No Coronet was ever a poster car and none ever will be. What it has instead is a presence in the background of an entire decade, which is what happens to a car that sells by the hundred thousand while nobody thinks of it as special.

Mechanically this is about as forgiving as a sixty-year-old car gets. The slant six, the 318, the 383 and the 440 are cast-iron engines that tolerate neglect and grumble for years before they actually quit, the TorqueFlite is one of the best automatics anybody built in the period, and the torsion-bar front end wants bushings, ball joints and an alignment rather than anything exotic. The real work is rust, and the B-body has favourites: the trunk floor and the rear frame rails beneath it, the lower quarters and wheel arches, inner and outer rockers, the floor pans under the carpet, and the steel at the hood hinges. Buy the cheapest car on offer and you will spend more on steel than the finished thing is worth. After that it is a short list of known items. Four-wheel drums fade if you use them properly, and most owners end up fitting the factory front disc setup. Hemi cars through 1969 want their valve lash checked and their two Carter four-barrels kept in balance, which is a large part of why so few Hemi cars get driven. Heater boxes leak. Convertible frames and top mechanisms are a project of their own. Nothing here is mysterious and nothing needs a specialist.