We love a good debate. Well at least we do when it comes to automotive trivia; you can keep debates pertaining to religion and politics to a different group of people. For example, we recently brought you a ’79 Dodge Li’l Red Express truck that we dug up on eBay for your viewing pleasure to hear your thoughts and opinions on.
While we’ve received a tremendous amount of feedback from it (some good, some bad), there was a bit of debate of what the original muscle truck was. We’ve discounted the El Camino SS and Ranchero GT’s, because face it, they were essentially just cars with pickup beds, and we were also accused of overlooking the ’64-’67 426 Wedge-powered Custom Sports Specials* and the ’70-’71 Dodge Dude (the latter literally being a trim package) by the same people.
We even heard from certain individuals that muscle (in all of its forms) died after ’71 or ’72. We disagree. Whether or not you want to accept the fact that a muscle car (or truck) can get away with not having a big-block between its fenders is your personal opinion, but we think they can come in all varieties.
Reinforcing our arguably factual opinion is the short-lived GMC Syclone, and while we won’t delve into the entire back story of these badass boosted trucks since we’ve done that in a previous article not long ago, we will share with you this 1-of-31 “Saudi” example.
Never heard of it? No worries, as they were all shipped to Saudi Arabia in 1991 to cater to our across the pond allies. Similar to our version, the Middle-East Syclones simply known in the SyTy community as the “Saudi Syclones” were equipped much like the ones sold here, but were not without their differences; the catalytic converter was replaced to with a straight pipe so it could run on leaded gas (the chip was replaced to compensate for that) and the Sunbird GT-sourced gauges were replaced with that of a [metric] Canadian S-10 gauge cluster.
With just over 30 units being sold overseas, one would think that these trucks would’ve sold, and sold quickly. However that wasn’t the case and quite a few of them have made it back to the States over the years -some of them almost immediately after the 1991 model year.
This particular example was found on eBay of all places, and currently resides at a lot in Virginia after a long stint in Arizona. With mileage of only 65k, and being immaculately clean, who wouldn’t want to own this even more exclusive example of a truck with a total production number of 2995 units? At press time, the current bid was only at $10k, after 13 bids. So act now!