A NEW VANISHING POINT; Did the muscle car era really disappear in 1973?(News)

Byline: MARK VAUGHN

Remember Vanishing Point, the 1971 cult movie classic? Barry Newman played the hero/antihero Kowalski who piloted a white 1970 Dodge Challenger from Denver to San Francisco in an epic car-chase masterpiece. It's on DVD now and you can buy it for a couple bucks. You have to see it for the Challenger alone. Like other great road films of the era like Two Lane Blacktop and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, the car played a co-starring role as the means to freedom for the heroes.

Kowalski, you may recall, was an outsider who used to be inside. In the parlance of the day, he was part of The Machine, man, first a soldier then a cop, forced to the fringes of society by The Man when his moral clarity threatened the status quo. It was then Kowalski willingly went from one Machine to another: from being a tool of The Man to being a pilot of a totally different tool he drove himself, the last great machine at the end of the great era of cheap gas and wide-open highways of The West, man (everyone capitalized important words back then, and everyone ended sentences with "man'').

Kowalski made a bet he could drive the Challenger from Denver to Frisco in 15 hours. The cops, of whom there were many, many, many, thought otherwise. Our goal was far simpler: To get around the oval of the San Bernardino County Sheriff's training facility in Devore without bashing a fender.

Like Kowalski, we had a Dodge Challenger and, also like him, we were surrounded by cops. Our cops were there for vehicle training in another part of the facility and thankfully ignored us. The Challenger meanwhile was the very Challenger concept that was the star of the Detroit auto show about five months earlier. Our car was made 36 years after his.

Kowalski would have felt perfectly at home in ours. In fact he might have liked our ride even better. As near as we can tell from exhaustive research (Mopar experts: Send those letters now!), Kowalski's Challenger was a 440 six-pack that would have made 390 hp back in the day. The new Challenger concept uses the 6.1-liter, 425-hp SRT8 Hemi V8 mated to a six-speed manual transmission.

Dodge lists 0 to 60 mph in the concept at 4.5 seconds and the quarter-mile in 13 seconds. Top speed is 174 mph. That would get Kowalski to San Francisco in about 14 minutes.