Tapping Hemi Memories, Chrysler Flexes Muscle Again

THEDAY.COM | By Garrett - - Nearly 20 years ago, Barry Washington stumbled across an unusual used car, a 1970 Dodge Challenger T/A. He didn't know much about it, other than that it had cool racing stripes, wild orange paint and a motor born for racing.

He bought the car, though he recalls thinking that the price, $6,500, seemed far too high. So began a new life for the driver and the car, whose value today is comfortably in six figures.

Not only was the Challenger T/A a rare model, it was especially an anomaly where Washington found it, near his home in Ketchikan, Alaska.

Ketchikan is on Revillagigedo Island reachable only by boat. The town doesn't even have a Dodge dealer; the previous owner had brought the car in by ship.

“I drove it around here every day for about three and a half years,” Washington said in an interview. “I did a lot of street racing with it. No one ever caught me.”

Fortunately for his driver's license, that included the local police.

During that time, Washington put 23,000 miles on the car — an amazing feat given that the island has only a few dozen miles of paved roads. The Challenger spent about 15 years outdoors in a town that, on average, has 200 rainy days a year.

About five years ago, Washington found a way to garage his car — not long after he found out how valuable it had become.

Prices for Challenger T/As, along with a whole generation of Challengers and Plymouth Barracudas, have risen exponentially in recent years, particularly since DaimlerChrysler announced in July that it would bring back the Challenger in 2008.

Washington's research revealed that the 1970 Challenger T/A was a racing version of Dodge's belated entry into the muscle car wars. Only 2,518 are known to have been built; Washington knows this because he has become perhaps the top authority on the cars. He now heads the Challenger T/A Registry (challengertaregistry.com) and is the spiritual leader of a group of owners and aficionados seeking to locate T/As or document what happened to all of them. “We're about halfway there,” he said, having cataloged 1,198 as of last week.

As much as the T/A (and the very similar 1970 AAR Plymouth 'Cuda) are worth, they are far from the most valuable of the Chrysler Corporation's original muscle cars.

'The holy grail'

“The holy grail of the muscle car world is the '71 Hemi 'Cuda convertible — just because so few of them were made,” said Steve Davis, vice president of the Barrett-Jackson Auction Company. “That's King Kong. After that, it would be maybe the '70 Hemi 'Cuda convertible, then the hardtop versions of those cars, the 440 “Six Pack' models (with three two-barrel carburetors) and then maybe some of the subsets, like the AAR 'Cudas or Challenger T/As.”

What does Davis mean by holy grail? The current auction record for a '71 Hemi 'Cuda convertible (one of fewer than a dozen made) is “well north of $2 million,” he said. He predicts that this record will be easily and repeatedly broken in January when a bumper crop of Dodge and Plymouth muscle cars go on the block at Barrett-Jackson's big auction in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Galen V. Govier of Eau Claire, Wis., who operates a service that verifies serial numbers, points out that a pristine 1971 Hemi 'Cuda convertible has skyrocketed in value from a range of $15,000 to $25,000 in 1985 to an estimated $3 million this year. Not bad for cars that cost about $5,000 new and were not huge sales successes.

Chrysler enthusiasts like to point out that the company was the first with a pony car — its Plymouth Barracuda was introduced on April Fools' Day, 1964, and was in dealerships a few weeks before the Ford Mustang. But Ford fans scoff, asking how there could have been a pony car before the Mustang, progenitor for the class, even went on sale.

In truth, the Barracuda was a pre-emptive strike; the Mustang's impending arrival was well-known, so Chrysler quickly cobbled together a fastback version of its Valiant compact, adding a huge glass rear window (dubbed the fish tank).

More than a million Mustangs were sold in just 18 months. Total Barracuda sales over 11 years never topped 400,000. (Its later-arriving cousin, the Challenger, accounted for 200,000 more.)

Not until the 1970 model year did Chrysler come up with fresh ground-up designs for pony/muscle cars, and by then the era was winding down. Within four years, Chrysler decided to discontinue them.

Yet their lack of marketplace success has helped to make Barracudas and Challengers coveted collectibles. In particular, the high values of Hemi-engine models reflect their scarcity when new. Hemis sold poorly partly because the engine cost nearly $900 extra and partly because buying insurance ranged from expensive to impossible.

Relatively few Barracudas or Challengers came with big V-8s; many had 6-cylinder engines. A cottage industry has evolved of people who convert cars with 6s and small V-8s into valuable big-block models. Hence the need for services like Govier's and Washington's, who verify the original equipment from serial numbers and documents.

The first Barracudas were powered by 6-cylinder motors or small 273-cubic-inch V-8s. In 1967, a better-defined model appeared, styled with more elan than the dowdy Valiant but still sharing the same unexciting engines. Barracudas from this era are worth little more than nice Valiants, perhaps $5,000 in showroom condition.

In 1970,Chrysler finally caught up as the Challenger joined the sexy new Barracuda. Each came in six styles with nine engine choices, including the race-ready 340 V-8 in Washington's car, a big-block 426-cubic-inch Hemi and even the huge 440.

Chrysler sold 83,032 Challengers in 1970, helping to lift Dodge's market share to 7 percent, its highest ever, and Plymouth sold a record 55,499 Barracudas. But sales tumbled the next year as the novelty wore off. A lackluster '72 redesign and the elimination of big V-8's drove sales lower. By 1974, the fat lady was on her last chorus.

The cars had already earned a spot in pop culture. The Challenger was a star in films from “Vanishing Point” (1971) to “2 Fast 2 Furious” (2003). While the Barracuda had a cleaner, classier design, resurrecting that nameplate would have been problematic, given that Chrysler phased out the Plymouth division four years ago.

Instead, Dodge unveiled a design study for a reborn Challenger at the Detroit auto show last January. By summer the car had a green light for production. “We hadn't seen this kind of spontaneous, passionate response to a car since the introduction of the Viper concept in 1989,” Thomas W. LaSorda, president of the Chrysler Group, said.

The only question is whether 2008 will be too late to take advantage of the muscle car renaissance — or will the Challenger be late, once again, to the muscle car party?