Without question, the gnarliest Direct Connection drag car to ever prowl the quarter-mile was the original Paul Rossi Dodge Challenger. What started life as a 1970 T/A got force-fed a serious attitude adjustment back in the day with satin Center Line Auto Drags, a fire-breathing 440 Six-Pack, and one of the coolest paint schemes ever unleashed on American asphalt. The result was pure drag racing royalty—a snarling, wheelstanding winner that burned itself into the brains of Mopar fanatics everywhere.
That car’s impact is still reverberating, albeit through a different set of slicks now and with help from the G3 Hemi heroes at Blackbird Performance Products. The Rossi name is riding an E-body’s door skins again, but this time on a new Challenger platform that’s more of a guided missile than it is modern muscle car.
“It’s essentially a ‘21 Drag Pak build, 366 CID, Whipple 3.0l Drag Pak supercharger, with the engine currently in pretty much NHRA Factory Showdown/Super Stock legal trim (meaning cam, heads, cubic inches, etc.) to shake it down,” says Blackbird head Geoff Turk.
After several years of steady progress with help from PMR Race Cars, the Chally finally backed out of the Blackbird barn under its own power for the first time about a month ago. Turk and team wasted no time laying the rubber down, taking it to their home track of Beech Bend Raceway just three days later.
The elapsed times will come. The records may come. But before any of that happens, the new Rossi Challenger has already passed the first test every truly great drag car must ace: it looks like it could rip a hole in the space-time continuum just backing out of the trailer.
