Exactly how extremist must a car nut be to buy a 1969 Dodge Charger R/T and cherish it beyond imagination, to the point he documented 64,000 miles worth of fuel fill-ups? On a scale from 1 to 10, this man gets a 440-4, no doubt about that. The car is doing fine, also. Thank you for asking. It is courtesy of a double neighbor of Bill Goldberg that we get to see it.
First of all, what is a ‘double neighbor?’ It’s a person who lives next to you twice – to the right and the left. In this case, it’s Martin Peake, owner of a car dealership in Kenner, Louisiana, who’s a major car addict in his spare time, too. Just how big? Well, consider this: at 14 years old, he walked into a used car dealership, jumped in the driver’s seat of a vehicle, and took off in a cloud of tire smoke.
The last bit was only in his dreams – he didn’t even start the car but instead made big-block V8 sounds to make his fantasy a bit more realistic. Twenty-five episodes of daydreaming later, the salesman in charge of the said dealership actually allowed young Martin to turn the key and get the Charger going.
I do apologize. Did I forget to mention that the car in question was the same 1969 Dodge Charger R/T 440-4? Perhaps now it gets clear why Martin came back to his dream car time after time, with clockwork precision. It took him a while to fulfill his boyhood dream, however, but when he nailed it, he did it in blockbuster style.
It took him 25 years of patient waiting before he found the car he’d always wanted (it had become his morning routine to get out of bed and start searching) —a real, unmolested, impeccable 1969 Dodge Charger R/T with the mighty 440 Magnum in it. The car had belonged to a man from Iowa since it was new and had been pampered like you wouldn’t believe it.
On March 29, 1969, the Charger, with 8 delivery miles on the clock, met its first owner – a record book keeps the date on the first page. The following pages – all of them, actually – contain detailed information about every single oil change, maintenance operation, part replacement, and so forth. A little later, the owner, probably not content with his method, added supplementary information about fuel top-ups.
Not simply dates and quantities but also the specific gas station, the exact fuel type, the price, and the mileage at the time of every refueling. And it wasn’t one of those situations where the car gets out of the garage once a year. No, the bookkeeping meticulously recorded all 64,000 miles of ownership (about 103,000 km) until the owner got a one-way ticket to the Happy Motoring Grounds to tell archangels how to adjust valves on a ’69 Charger RT.
That’s when Martin Peake got word about the car—the owner’s widow sold it, and a 14-year-old boy’s lifelong dream finally became reality. The F8 Green paint looks as if the Charger just drove out of the factory yesterday, and there’s probably no better-looking survivor Dodge than this example.
Martin Peake, the ‘double neighbor’ of William Goldberg, doesn’t have a thing just for Mopars – his collection goes from an old VW van to a Z06 Corvette C8. But the Dodge is in a category of its own, the ‘I’ll never sell it’ special.
The car has a four-speed behind those 7.2 liters of Mopar big-block power (375 horses, 480 lb-ft of torque, to be exact; in metric, that’s 380 PS, 651 Nm), and it starts, runs, and drives like day one, even if the odometer currently reads over 69,000 miles (111,000+ kilometers).
Even Bill Goldberg preferred to ride shotgun in it and politely declined the owner’s invitation to take the wheel, that’s how cool this car is. (I mean that both ways, metaphorically and literally – two years after buying it, the original owner went back to the Chrysler dealership and had air conditioning put in his beloved muscle car). That’s proper car manners, especially when it comes to such fabulous rides like this survivor 1969 Dodge Charger R/T 440-4.