Junkyard Find: 1979 Plymouth Champ, With Twin-Stick!
The tales of the many flavors of rebadged Chrysler Europe and Mitsubishi products sold as Plymouths and Dodges remain perennially fascinating for me, what with all the Chryslerized Simcas and Hillmans and so forth, and one example of this breed that appears to have disappeared from the face of the earth is the Plymouth Champ. The Champ was a fourth-generation Mitsubishi Mirage, a gas-sipping front-driver that received Colt nameplates for the Dodge side of the showroom floor, and I found one a few days ago at a Denver-area self-service yard.
The Champ name existed for just the 1979 through 1982 model years, after which Chrysler must have decided that marketing confusion could be reduced and money saved on emblem production by selling both Plymouth- and Dodge-badged Colts.
This one is a particularly ghastly shade of Malaise Green, which is set off nicely by the tape stripes.
This car features the super-cool Twin-Stick aka Super Shift transmission, which had a high-low range selector that multiplied the four forward gears into eight gears. Essentially, it was an overdrive box built into the transaxle. In practice, just about nobody drove the Twin-Stick by going through all eight gear ranges in sequence— mostly, you just left it in one range or the other and drove it like a regular four-speed.
But still, the Twin-Stick was cool.
This is the “big-block” 1.6 liter 4G32 Saturn engine, which made a mighty 80 horsepower.
I was very tempted to buy this POWER/ECONOMY indicator light for my collection of weird Japanese instrument-panel parts, but did not do so.
It looks to be an original Colorado car.
Cars don’t tend to rust much here in the dry High Plains climate, but Japanese cars of the 1970s could find a way to rust in a vacuum.
It’s worn out, but essentially complete. How many Champs are left in the wild?
Chuck Woolery says the ’79 Champ is the Southern California mileage champ.
”
Just don’t crash your Champ!
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
More by Murilee Martin
Comments
Join the conversation
Hello.I just bought a house and have 3 old cars in the garage One of this one is a original 1979 Champ Japanese.All original paint and body all good.Thank for the information now I know about this car
Marie
are you able to share the name of the yard you found this at?