When Dodge ultimately got around to responding to the Mustang and Camaro in 1970, designer Carl Cameron’s coupe went wide and mouthy with the sheetmetal and put the residents in a kind of speed bunker behind a huge engine. Needless to say, the Challenger was a kid of its era, relying on a loud throttle and not much else for its overall performance. Places like Dead Man’s Curve therefore exacted their butcher’s bills.
In the present day, the trend in vintage muscle equipment is to modernize underneath the skin while leaving largely intact the enduring works of Cameron and his contemporaries. That indicates suspension and brake work, for beginners, and the Hotchkis E-Max Challenger is a showboat for one company’s comparatively affordable bolt-on handling systems.
Hotchkis Sport Suspension, in the Los Angeles suburb of Santa Fe Springs, developed the roughly $70,000 E-Max from an eBay find. The 18-inch Forgeline ZX3 wheels ($3900), the black-and-yellow war paint, the Sparco Milano front buckets ($800), and the custom fiberglass air-scooping hood notwithstanding, the E-Max isn’t a completely reengineered Pro Touring overhaul on par along with the six-figure ’69 “Red Devil” Camaro we profiled in August 2011.
This E-body Challenger (hence the name, which essentially means “E to the max”) retains more of its vintage shaky vibe, with its unique six-pack-carb setup atop a cammed-up 340 Mopar small-block V-8, bored 0.030 over and rattling the chassis’ loose rafters through Flowmasters and thundering side exhaust outlets. When it’s cold, you can hear each cylinder firing like unique sticks of dynamite, a raunchy piper’s tune that draws out the neighborhood’s 14-to-18-year-old male population in herds. A five-speed Tremec transmission provides a welcome overdrive and digs the 3524-pound hunk of teen fantasy out of a hole briskly.
The 60-mph mark passed in 5.3 seconds, but the first couple of upshifts demonstrated balky, as if the transmission were tired, and pushed the quarter-mile to 14 seconds flat.
The TVS shows are new tubular front upper-control arms with a gleaming silver finish and elegant gusseting. They diminish bump steer triggered by caster gain in the car’s original design by lowering the control arm’s forward anchor point. Adjustable lower diagonal rods, an anti-roll bar, and quicker steering linkages tighten wheel location and body control while enhancing steering response.
In the rear, new “geometry corrected” leaf springs with modified front mounts redirect the vertical motion of the rear axle in cornering to get rid of the factory-tuned bias toward understeer. Lowered and damped by specially tuned Bilstein shocks (a $400 four-pack), the E-Max is one feisty grandpa that can wrestle with any young import in the curves. The $3000 Stoptech big-disc brake kit creates a firm pedal feel and, with the Falken Azenis RT-615K tires, yields 70-to-0-mph stopping distances that are respectable in the 21st century.
What amounts to an extra 10 grand or so worth of suspension, brake, and wheel and tire work above a ’70–74 Challenger’s purchase price.
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