It's the mid '90s. The Fresh Prince is on TV, you just bought a new bucket hat and Reebok Pumps, and you are looking for a sweeeet V8 ride to go cruising in. But flipping through the pages of your new car magazine seems a bit depressing. Sure, there are plenty of cool JDM coupes and Porsche 911s that looked like they were designed in the '60s (note: they were), but not much that really shouted old school muscle.You want rear-drive, eight cylinders, and a bargain bucket price tag, not some whizzy import that costs a fortune, right? While muscle cars seemed to all but disappear during the '90s, one company offered a helping hand — it just wasn't exactly what anyone expected. The Muscle Car Was Starting To Feel Like A Memory In The '90s Via Bring a Trailer Back in the '60s, it didn't matter if you needed a tank of gas to drive down to the mall. Gas was cheap, people had jobs, and money seemed to be easy to come by for a lot of young Americans. The establishment reacted by ditching the cars that your mom and pop would have bought and started offering something called a muscle car. These V8 coupes were so called because they had a muscular V8 and you needed big biceps to pull them out of a ditch if you overestimated your skills at handling a car with drum brakes and 500 horsepower.But come the end of the '60s, the world was waking up with a hangover from too much swinging. With oil prices on the rise, not to mention insurance companies getting wise to teenagers driving cars with more power than heavy-duty construction machinery, the muscle car was quietly abandoned, while Japanese manufacturers cleverly filled the gap. Fast Trucks Were Slowly Becoming A Thing Via Mecum The trend was started by the comically-named Dodge Li'l Red Express pickup truck in the late '70s. By being exempt from emissions requirements, this 225-horsepower, 5.9-liter V8 pickup was briefly the fastest vehicle sold in America. It may have been made as a tongue-in-cheek half-joke, but the bright red Dodge pickup showed that the market and media loved a fast truck. By the late '80s, Carroll Shelby was helping to develop the Dodge Shelby Dakota, and three years later, GMC had worked out how to make a truck that could outrun Ferraris. While Dodge had been focusing on the incredible V10-powered Viper, it had moved away from traditional muscle cars in the '90s. But all that was about to change. Apart from the traditional bit. The Dodge Dakota R/T Was Completely Unapologetic Bring A Trailer Dodge must have been getting the odd fax in the '90s asking where its V8-powered, two-door, rear-drive offerings were. There were a few muscle cars still being sold, such as the Mustang and Firebird, but Chrysler didn't really have much to challenge them on paper. But Mustang sales in the '90s were teetering around half what they were in the '80s, and perhaps it would have been too much of a risk to try to market a new coupe muscle car for Dodge.Dodge did have a rear-drive, two-door model that was already selling in its hundreds of thousands, which could handle a bit more power. It's just that it was a pickup, designed primarily for shifting bails of hay and sheets of drywall. What the heck, thought Dodge. The R/T Was Pure Muscle Car Thinking Bring a Trailer Dodge must have had a few dustry books on its shelves entitled "how to make a muscle car", because the Dakota R/T was staright out of the '60s playbook. That is: you take a small vehicle and corwbar in the largest powerplant available into the engine bay. When the Dakota 5.9 R/T arrived in April 1998 it came fitted with a box-stock Magnum small-block V8. The output was 250 horsepower, not a huge number, but torque sat at a healthy 345 lb-ft.Bear in mind that a base Firebird of 1998 only had 305 horsepower, so the Dakota wasn't far behind, and eclipsed its 335 lb-ft of torque. The Dakota R/T — the name an iconic abbreviation for Road and Track — didn't need to make any excuses. In the face of the wrung-out techy Japanese cars, the Dakota R/T was pure old school muscle, and made for a perfect leftfield slice of nostalgia. The Dakota R/T Could Hold Its Own At The Traffic Light Grand Prix Bring a Trailer The rear-wheel -drive R/T came fitted with an automatic overdrive transmission and a 3.91 Sure-Grip rear. Ride height was dropped by two inches, and Dodge then fitted a 21mm rear sway bar along with 17-inch wheels and chunky 255/55R17 Goodyear tires. Externally, the Dakota was slightly enhanced, with flared wheelarches giving a more aggressive look. The color choice was limited to Black, Flame Red, Intense Blue, or Deep Amethyst.The performance wasn't out of this world, but it wouldn't be embarrassed easily at the lights. Reaching 60 mph in 7.08 seconds, and covering the quarter mile in 15.50 at 88.72 mph, meaning you should be able to see off both a 1995 Nissan 200SX SE-R and a 1995 Acura Integra LS. The Dakota R/T Was Short Lived Bring a Trailer While the Dakota R/T survived for five years (between 1998 and 2003), Dodge only managed to shift 16,496 of them. That equates to just over 3,000 a year. That's a far cry from the hundreds of thousands of muscle cars that were being shifted every year during the genre's so-called Golden Era. But Dodge had a new direction. The S197 Mustang was proof that a retro-styled muscle car was the perfect product for an era that had rediscovered the '60s, and Dodge was in on the game, introducing the old-school Charger and Challenger.In 2005, Dodge unleashed another R/T badge, this time glued onto the back of the new four-door Charger. This R/T came fitted with a meaty 340-horsepower 5.7-liter Hemi V8. While the Dakota R/T was a steal at $19,000, the Charger seemed similar, if not better value (considering its power advantage) at $29,995. The new muscle car Golden Era was upon us, and it sure sounded good. Sadly, there wasn't much need for a fast truck anymore... The Dakota R/T Is A Muscle Truck Bargain Today Bring A TrailerIf you fancy a muscle car that's actually a truck, then there is good news. The Dakota R/T is pretty affordable right now. It's also the kind of vehicle that you could imagine becoming a sought-after slice of early 2000s nostalgia too. It's not unusual to see R/Ts without sky-high mileage (think in the 80K range) going for around $13,000, with higher milers going for even less.Very seldom used R/Ts still drop under $20,000. Compare them to the sports car-like Ford SVT Lightning (1999 to 2004) and the Dakota R/Ts are even more of a bargain. True, the Lightning is faster and has the kudos of being in The Fast and the Furious, but you will need to pay between $30,000 and $50,000 to get a low-mileage example of this fast Ford. Either way, you'll have some fun at every set of lights you stop at.Sources: Holley.com