It was not at all unusual back in the day for Baby Boomers to buy a car brand new at the dealership and take it straight out to the drag strip to see how it would do. That was the muscle car era, and those were great times. With that backdrop, a really unique factory sports car was produced called the 1969 Rambler SC/Rambler, (pronounced “rambler scrambler.”) It came with bizarre paint and enough power to run low ET’s with ease.
American Motors engineers were feeling a little left out. Few people knew they had a muscle car department there at the old Nash plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin in the AMC headquarters. Nor did they know that they had some pretty smart engineers who desperately wanted to show the world that they could design muscle cars, too.
So they produced the Rambler SC/Rambler on the base Rambler Roque platform with enough pizzazz to get noticed and enough horsepower to put Chevy, Ford and Chrysler on notice. The result was one of the most exciting muscle cars of all time, the 1969 AMC Hurst Rambler SC/Rambler.
When a 1969 AMC Hurst SC/Rambler was listed on the Cars-On-Line website in the AMC Muscle Car Section this week, it caused a ripple in the American Motors collector community. Only 1,512 Rambler SC/Ramblers were ever built. Historians think that about 1,200 SC/Ramblers came from the factory with the broad red body sides, wild hood graphics, and a fat blue dorsal stripe. This was referred to as the “A” color scheme. People also called it the “Yankee Doodle” paint job. It was the most popular of the two color schemes for these collector cars. And it got your attention at the drag strip. Having been restored by AMC Muscle Car guru Gordy Chilson of Pennsylvania, the 1969 AMC Hurst Rambler SC/Rambler you see in this article has the right equipment, and is believed to be an original SC/Rambler. It is for sale on the Cars-On-Line.com website currently. Follow this link to view the ad and photos.
Hurst Gets Involved
AMC hired Hurst Performance Research Inc., to do the build. They were an aftermarket builder with a great reputation among auto makers in Detroit. They added their performance cues to the Rambler SC/Rambler to turn it into a factory drag car.
AMC and Hurst Performance thought it would be a cool idea to take the compact sized AMC Rambler Rogue and shoehorn in the AMX’s 315 horsepower 390 ci V8 engine with a 4-barrel. Then they gave it a Borg-Warner 4-speed with a Hurst shifter and transferred the power to the ground through a 3.54:1 “Twin Grip” limited-slip rear end. Heavy-duty shocks, anti-sway bar and anti-hop rear links from the factory gave the heavy-duty suspension the right stiffness.
The 1969 AMC Hurst SC/Rambler muscle car was a terror at the race track with ET times of 14.2 in the quarter-mile right off the showroom floor. They were capable of leaving a GTO, Chevelle or Camaro in their rear view mirror.
AMC’s optional heavy-duty brakes with front discs were standard along with straight-through glass-pack mufflers and a vacuum-controlled “upturned” hood scoop. The interior included reclining buckets. Even from the factory an 8000-rpm Sun tach came attached to the steering column.
The AMC Rambler was the last AMC car to be marketed in both the U.S. and Canadian markets. It was America’s lowest priced car during those years and an unlikely candidate to enter the muscle car market of the late ’60s. A car that light with so much horsepower. That was the attraction.
American Muscle Cars told us that only 322 SC/Ramblers are known to exist from the 1,512 which were originally produced. Of those, only 182 are proven to be original “A” paint scheme cars. There were 1,200 original “A” scheme cars produced. The base price of an original SC/Rambler back in the day was $2,998. AMC reported that a factory SC/Rambler would do 0 to 60 in 6.3 seconds.
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