1971 Plymouth Cuda in Sassy Grass Green Paint & 440 Engine Sound

Plymouth called this color Sassy Grass Green, part of a deliberately loud High Impact palette designed to make its muscle cars impossible to ignore. Wrapped around a factory 440-powered 1971 ‘Cuda restored by owner Tom Benson’s own restoration company, it drew comments calling the front end “the best of any muscle car” from the era. Filmed at Barrett-Jackson Scottsdale, this is a restoration built to hold up under serious scrutiny. Watch the full walkaround and hear the 440 run.

Sassy Grass Green isn’t a color most manufacturers would risk on a flagship muscle car. Plymouth put it on this ‘Cuda anyway, and more than fifty years later, people are still calling it one of the best-looking front ends the entire muscle car era ever produced. That’s a strange thing to say about a color named, quite literally, after grass — until you actually see it wrapped around a 440-powered 1971 ‘Cuda in person. Then the argument stops being about the paint at all.

A Color Named Exactly What It Looks Like

Sassy Grass Green belongs to Plymouth’s High Impact color program, a lineup of deliberately loud, almost confrontational factory paint options rolled out in 1970 and 1971 specifically to make Mopar’s muscle cars impossible to ignore on a dealer lot. Names like In-Violet, Vitamin C, and Sassy Grass Green weren’t accidents — they were marketing decisions, meant to signal that Plymouth wasn’t interested in blending in with more conservative factory colors from Ford or Chevrolet. On this particular ‘Cuda, that boldness gets paired with a restoration precise enough that one commenter ranked the combination among their personal top three High Impact colors of the entire era, calling the finished car both gorgeous and top-notch.

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The Front End Comment Nobody Expected

One of the more striking reactions in the comments wasn’t about the color or the engine at all — it was a claim that the 1971 ‘Cuda might have “the best front end of any muscle car” built during the entire era. That’s a bold statement given how crowded the competition is, but it points to something real about the 1971 Barracuda’s design: the elongated hood, the deep-set grille, and the aggressive fender lines were a deliberate departure from the more restrained ’70 model, and Plymouth’s designers leaned hard into making the car look as aggressive parked as it was under full throttle. Paired with a factory 440 and a paint job engineered to be seen from across a parking lot, that front-end styling is exactly the kind of detail that turns a muscle car into a design icon rather than just a fast sedan.

Restored by Someone Who Restores Cars for a Living

Owner Tom Benson isn’t just a collector — he runs a restoration company, Rant ‘N’ Rave Auto LLC, and this ‘Cuda is a direct advertisement for the quality of that work. Viewers picked up on it immediately, with one commenter specifically praising “the paint and detail to this green machine” as tremendous, and another calling the restoration top-notch without qualification. That distinction matters in a hobby where plenty of cars pass through amateur or budget restorations that hold up fine at a distance but fall apart under close inspection. A professional restorer putting his own name and his own car in front of a Barrett-Jackson crowd is effectively staking his business’s reputation on every seam, panel gap, and paint match holding up to expert scrutiny — and by the comments, it did.

What a Factory-Optioned ‘Cuda Actually Looked Like

One commenter offered a detailed memory of his father’s own 1971 ‘Cuda, ordered new with the smaller 340 engine and a three-speed manual, but loaded with options that reveal how deep Plymouth’s build sheet actually went: rally dash, E60-15 tires on 15×7 rally wheels, quick-ratio manual steering, power front disc brakes, a Hemi dual-breaker distributor, black vinyl roof, dealer-installed air conditioning, and color-coded bumpers that famously had a habit of peeling — enough of a problem that Chrysler’s factory fix was simply swapping them for standard chrome bumpers instead. That level of build-sheet detail, preserved decades later in a fan’s memory, shows just how customizable these cars were beyond the headline engine choice, and how much variation existed between two ‘Cudas that might look nearly identical from across a parking lot.

The Color Wasn’t Just for the ‘Cuda

Sassy Grass Green wasn’t reserved exclusively for the ‘Cuda flagship. One commenter described owning a 1971 Plymouth Duster finished in the same color, but powered by a modest 198-cubic-inch slant six with manual brakes and steering — about as far from a 440-powered ‘Cuda as Plymouth’s lineup got. He noted the car still drew constant challenges to race, purely on the strength of its aggressive color and Duster styling, despite an engine with a fraction of the power sitting under a ‘Cuda’s hood. That contrast is a useful reminder that Plymouth’s High Impact colors were available across nearly the entire lineup, not just the performance flagships, meaning the visual drama of a car like this green ‘Cuda could show up on far more modest, far more affordable Plymouths as well.

A Setting That Matches the Car’s Ambition

This particular ‘Cuda was filmed at Barrett-Jackson’s Scottsdale auction, one of the highest-profile stages in the collector car world, where cars are routinely scrutinized by serious buyers and enthusiasts with decades of expertise. Presenting a restoration in that environment, rather than at a smaller regional show, raises the stakes considerably — flaws that might go unnoticed at a local cruise-in get picked apart on a Barrett-Jackson show floor. That this ‘Cuda drew the reaction it did in that specific setting says something about the quality of Benson’s work, and about how a bold color choice paired with a flawless restoration can hold its own even surrounded by some of the most valuable collector cars in the country.

Why This Green Still Stops People

More than fifty years after Plymouth first offered Sassy Grass Green, it’s still doing exactly the job it was designed to do: stopping people in their tracks. Combined with what more than one commenter called the best front-end design of the entire muscle car era, and backed by a professional-grade restoration from an owner who restores cars for a living, this ‘Cuda is a reminder that the High Impact color program wasn’t a gimmick. It was Plymouth understanding, decades before anyone talked about it in those terms, that a genuinely great design deserves a color loud enough to match it.

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