This Challenger is presented in a retro “high impact” color called Plum Crazy. I love cars with distinct paint colors, and particularly throwback colors on retro styled muscle cars. My own vehicle bears a paint color that’s a throwback to the green that was available on vintage Mustangs, called Legend Lime. What’s interesting about this Challenger is that in a way, it pairs up with my Mustang pretty well.
I was actually going to be sensible after deciding to put my previous Mustang out to pasture and buy myself a new Escape. I had one all picked out and was planning on going to the dealership where it sat to negotiate on it later in the week when I pulled up to a stop light along Washington Avenue next to a Mercury Mariner, which is the mechanical twin of the Escape. It was cute enough and the people inside seemed happy, but as I looked over at the car, I tried to picture myself in the driver’s seat, and that driver in my car. I realized that if I were sitting in a compact crossover at this stop light with a Mustang next to me, I’d look over and wish that I was behind the wheel of the Mustang instead.
When I got to where I was going, I decided I’d do one last thing before making definite plans to buy my sensible compact crossover. I hopped on line and plugged in the specs for the Mustang I wanted. I had a very particular car in mind, and it was one that I had been longing for since the day I interviewed for the job in car sales that I worked previously. When I interviewed, there was a poster on the wall of the Ford/Mercury/Saleen dealership I ended up working for. The poster was of a Legend Lime Mustang, and as I sat in the office during the interview, my eyes kept wandering over to the poster. I couldn’t help but admire the car it featured. I decided that some day, I was going to have one of those myself -the car, not the poster. When I sold for that dealership, I told myself that if we ever got a Legend Lime Mustang in our inventory, and it had the options I wanted, I was going to swoop in and buy it.
My option list evolved over time to include a few things. It had to be Legend Lime green, which narrowed the field substantially, as the color was only offered for two years and on relatively few Mustangs. It had to be a GT or some variant of the GT like a Roush, Shelby, or Saleen -though finding one of those for sale both in green and in a price range that was reasonable would be tough. I wanted leather interior and heated seats (Minnesota, ya’ know) and a decklid spoiler (or none at all so I could add on the one I wanted aftermarket), but not the run of the mill pedestal decklid spoiler. I also wanted a manual transmission. This color just isn’t that common, and oddly enough, a Legend Lime green Mustang, GT or otherwise never did grace our showroom floor while I worked in car sales, so my wish went unfulfilled.
Back at my car search a couple years later, I plugged in as many of these specs as I could and came up with just a handful of Mustangs available across the nation. Legend Lime had only been offered for two years, both of which had passed, so now I was shopping used rather than new, but I wanted one with low mileage. The results were not even a handful, really. There were three or four. One of them was eliminated right away for having a salvage title, another had cloth interior but was a Roush Stage 1, which is really just an appearance upgrade, but I still kept it on the list, another had higher miles than I wanted to see. …And then there was the fourth, which happened to be sitting in the lot at a dealership in the very city where my parents lived. It had absolutely everything I wanted. I called my parents and told them I’d be coming down to visit that weekend and put my Escape plan on the back burner, figuring if I didn’t like this Mustang, I could always go back to it.
My Mustang had just been taken in on trade for a Super Duty pickup truck and hadn’t been prepped to go on sale on the lot yet, but the dealership had posted it online right away. In posting it, they had mislabeled it as a manual transmission, when in fact, it’s an automatic. That was very nearly a deal breaker for me.
I thought back to when I went on a test drive in a Grabber Orange GT Mustang with a gentleman who was a race car driver. The one we took out was, as I said, Grabber Orange, and had black racing stripes. It was also an automatic, which is something I cautioned the guy about, because most men who would come in looking for Mustangs scoffed at the idea of buying an automatic. This guy just shrugged and said it didn’t matter to him because he could make the car go fast either way. We went out on back country roads and that guy gave me the ride of my life in that Mustang, whipping it around corners, nearly taking it airborne several times, but always maintaining control. He showed me exactly what separates a GT Mustang from a little 6 cylinder, which is what I was driving for my personal car at the time: Power and performance. The GT and its 6 cylinder little brother are simply two different breeds. The GT is like a thundering race horse, and the 6 cylinder is the sweet little pony who likes to gallop a bit. It was that day that cemented the addition of GT or higher performance to my list of Legend Lime Mustang demands. It was also that day, experiencing first hand what a skilled driver could do with a Mustang GT that made me compromise my demand for a manual transmission. It turned out to be a good thing, too, because I sometimes find myself needing to borrow larger vehicles like trucks, SUV’s or vans to haul stuff around, and having an automatic transmission means I can do a day trade of my car with friends who have those vehicles without having to worry if they know how to drive stick. It worked out pretty well.
Because I was in the town where my parents lived, they tagged along to the dealership.. Actually, they went to the Jeep dealership next door to the Ford dealership because they were going to have some routine maintenance done on my mother’s Jeep. The two dealerships are actually owned by the same conglomerate, so they can pull cars from each other’s lots on “dealer trade” with relative ease. My dad pulled me aside and pointed out a Plum Crazy Challenger and told me that I ought to be negotiating a deal on that car instead. The color is definitely distinct, and I do like it, but in Minnesota, I’d come off as some kind of nutty, hard core Vikings fan driving around in a purple Challenger. And besides, I’d found my Mustang.
I would have had to pay quite a bit more for the Plum Crazy Challenger R/T than I paid for my Mustang. Both were used and had roughly the same mileage, but the Challenger was newer than the Mustang. I negotiated down to a deal I liked that made up for the automatic transmission, so I had no buyer’s remorse about the sale.
The Challenger R/T has a 5.7L Hemi V8 with 372 HP, so, compared to the older Mustang with its 4.6L V8 and 300 HP (bumped up just a bit by custom exhaust so it breathes better), it’s faster. Fuel economy is about the same between the two… a bit better for the Mustang with high teens for city and mid 20’s for highway driving as opposed to the Challenger‘s mid teens city and low 20‘s highway. The Challenger is heavier by around 500 lbs, so there’s that weight to haul around with those extra ponies, which can still make up the difference in performance. Between the two, I picked the one I wanted, but I’m sure that my dad, owner of a few Chargers and Barracuda’s back in his youth, would have gone for the Mopar.
This Plum Crazy Challenger is a 2009. There are very few 09’s you’ll see in Plum Crazy (well, few of any year in this color, actually). In fact, for a while, I was wondering if this one bears an aftermarket paint job. My understanding had been that in 2009, you could only get a limited edition SRT-8 in Plum Crazy that came with plum stitching on the seats and a horizontal plum colored stripe of leather stitched into the seat upholstery, too. I can’t find definitive info saying I’m right or wrong, so this could be the real deal, but it doesn’t have Plum Crazy matching interior. I looked at the car, and the door sills and inside of the trunk lid all bear the Plum paint, so if it is an aftermarket paint job, it’s a good and thorough one. Those silver stripes are aftermarket, though. From the factory, you could only get the side stripes in white or black, and they run the length of the car just near the belt line, terminating on the rear fenders with an “RT” design rather than just solid stripe all the way back. The spoiler, too has been mucked about, as it should be a matte black finish instead of painted the body color if it was stock from the factory. Of course, those rims aren’t what the car came with either.
I’m glad somebody put the side stripe on this Challenger though, because these cars are just too slab-sided to leave solid, especially when dealing with an eye-popping color like Plum Crazy. I can’t help but wonder if the person who did these mods has damaged the value of the vehicle a bit. Plum Crazy Challengers are speculator cars. People buy them and put them in storage or only rarely take them for a spin as they hold on to them and let them eventually increase in value after the initial dip while you can still buy new ones. An original, Challenger from the 70’s, stock, with factory applied Plum Crazy paint is a thing of value based just on the rarity of its hue, so you can see where Dodge is going with its special edition offering of throw back paints. When all is said and done, I supposed I have to give it the stoplight test. If I pulled up next to a Challenger at a stoplight along Washington Ave, would I want to be in that car instead of my Mustang? Nah, I love my Mustang, and I'm happy with it just the way it is ...though once the warranty I have on it expires, I might look into supercharging it.
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