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Book review - Mopar: The Performance Years
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Hot off the presses, and none too soon!
It’s time for musclecar fans to rejoice once again—Mopar: The Performance Years is now back in print! Unavailable for over 20 years and more recently held captive by greedy eBay sellers, this three volume series from the 1980s has been compiled into one (the original two volumes plus a good chunk of volume three) . . . and it’s all at a price point that’s liable to drive eBay sellers spin dizzy! Set up in chronological order starting in the early-1960s, you can think of it as a field guide for following Chrysler’s performance evolution during a very exciting and volatile period.
I remember this series well because when I was a teen visiting any mall in the 1980s, I’d steal away from Mom and pay a visit to B. Dalton or Waldenbooks. For a car-crazy kid like me, this was the place to devour stuff like Tom Bonsall’s "Source Book" and "Muscle Book" series, Roger Huntingdon’s American Supercar treatise, old road tests from the Brooklands Books series, and the multi-make "The Performance Years" Quicksilver Supercar Series. The irony of all this is that I never bought any of those titles when they were new, having had to resort to those damn eBayers who think everything out of print is worth its weight in black gold!
What makes this Mopar book different from all the others previously mentioned is that it consists of topical Mopar articles straight from the pen of Marty Schorr, who was editorial director for Magnum Automotive Group and also edited its flagship title Hi-Performance Cars magazine. When these cars were new, Marty was testing the living crap out of the coolest musclecars known to Man . . . and then telling us about it. Flip through the pages of Mopar: The Performance Years and you’ll recognize seedy after seedy NYC locale because these are the same articles that were appearing in Magnum publications at the time. Today it seems hard to imagine seeing a Max Wedge Dodge sittin’ pretty in a downtrodden Brooklyn ‘hood lookin’ to give some wayward 409 a knuckle sandwich, but back then it was not such an unusual sight.
So by now you should know that folks in the five boroughs + Long Island take things very seriously . . . and if ya gotta problem wit dat, swift street justice is par for the course. What’s great about the articles in Marty’s book is that he has the smarts that the street demands yet he rises above it all to spin a story out of love. Having already reviewed his new book on Joel Rosen and Motion Performance, I notice the exact same enthusiasm because he’s a car nut who can’t get over his good fortune.
Indeed, reading through the chapters, from forays into Manhattan in a prototype 1965 Hemi Coronet to kicking the ass of a brand-new honest-to-goodness Hemi’Cuda ragtop, you can’t help but get the feeling Marty was the luckiest guy in the world. This book presents the cars as they were—not as revisionist history through contemporary eyes—and while it’s true that time and hindsight have corrected some misconceptions that continue to confound experts and so-called experts to this day, Mopar: The Performance Years is akin to getting Mopar history from the horse’s mouth.
Mopar: The Performance Years is published by 671 Press
SBN: 978-0-9821733-1-2
8.268 x 11.693 in. Paperback
450 B&W photos
198 pages
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