A Florida Barracuda sat abandoned for over two decades before Vice Grip Garage’s Derek Bieri tracked it down and got its tired Slant Six running again. See what it took to bring a piece of pony car history back from the dead — and why bidding on the finished project shot past $7,100.
For more than two decades, a 1965 Plymouth Barracuda sat parked in the Florida sun, its factory paint fading and its Slant Six growing quieter with every year that passed. Most cars left that long simply don’t come back — the rust wins, the seller loses interest, and the car ends up parted out in somebody’s side yard. But when Derek Bieri of Vice Grip Garage, the YouTube channel with more than 2 million subscribers built entirely on rescuing cars everyone else had written off, found this fastback, he saw something worth fighting for. What followed was a stubborn, grease-under-the-fingernails battle against a fuel system that didn’t want to flow, brakes that didn’t want to work, and an engine that hadn’t turned over in years — and by the end, a car from the very birth of the pony car era was running, driving, and headed for a new owner.
Twenty-Three Years of Florida Sun Took Its Toll
Bieri picked up this 1965 Barracuda in Florida, and the video’s own title says it all: “ABANDONED Barracuda Officially Revived After 23 YEARS.” Reporting on the build at the time pegged the car as having sat untouched for more than two decades, and it showed everywhere Bieri looked. Getting it running again meant working through nearly every system on the car: a new timing chain and gearset, rebuilt brakes with fresh wheel cylinders, a new master cylinder and brake hoses, and a full ignition tune-up that included a Mopar electronic ignition conversion. New belts, hoses, a starter, a battery, and an alternator rounded out the resurrection list — the kind of methodical, system-by-system troubleshooting that separates a real revival from a quick trailer-queen fix.
Florida cars rust differently than the ones that spend their winters salted up north, and this Barracuda is a textbook example. Instead of rot creeping up from the rockers and floors, the damage here worked top-down — the leading edge of the hood, the cowl, underneath the trim, and the trunk lid all carried the telltale signs of two decades of sun and humidity. The interior needed a full carpet replacement, and Bieri, a man with a famously high tolerance for the smells that come with these projects, admitted this one “doesn’t smell the greatest.” Even after the major repairs, a couple of gremlins remained: a sticking starter and an alternator that wouldn’t charge, exactly the kind of unfinished business that makes these revival videos feel real instead of scripted.
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The Barracuda That Beat the Mustang to Showrooms
This particular car is a first-generation Barracuda — not to be confused with the more muscular fastback ‘Cuda models that arrived a few years later and get most of the attention today. Plymouth built the first Barracuda on the compact Valiant platform and rushed it into showrooms on April 1, 1964, a full 16 days before Ford’s Mustang made its debut at the World’s Fair. That head start didn’t stop the Mustang from becoming the sales phenomenon of the decade, but it did make the Barracuda America’s first true pony car, and it set the template — long hood, short deck, sporty fastback roofline with that enormous wraparound rear window — that every muscle car of the era would eventually borrow from.
Under the hood of this particular car sits a 225-cubic-inch Slant Six making 145 horsepower, paired with a three-speed manual shifted from the column. It’s not the big-block, tire-shredding image most people picture when they hear “muscle car,” but the Slant Six was Chrysler’s bulletproof workhorse of the 1960s, and pairing it with the three-on-the-tree A-903 transmission — complete with its quirky non-synchromesh first gear — made this Barracuda an honest, affordable entry point into the pony car world rather than a flexed-out performance flagship. Because the first-generation Barracuda never got the marketing push Ford gave the Mustang, clean survivors and honest project cars like this one have historically traded for less than comparable Mustangs of the same year, even though the Barracuda got to the party first.
1965 also marked the first year Plymouth offered the Formula S performance package on the Barracuda, pairing a roughly 235-horsepower 273-cubic-inch V8 with a stiffer suspension, a dash-mounted tachometer, and wider tires aimed squarely at buyers cross-shopping the Mustang. Most Barracuda buyers that year skipped it and stuck with a car much like this one — a Slant Six-powered base model built for reliable, everyday transportation rather than stoplight bragging rights, which is exactly why honest survivors like it tend to fly under the radar compared to their V8 siblings today.
Why This Rescue Struck a Chord With Fans
Vice Grip Garage has built a massive following by documenting exactly this kind of unglamorous, hands-on rescue work, without pretending every fix goes smoothly. Watching a stubborn Slant Six finally fire after years of silence, or a set of brakes come back to life one bled line at a time, is the appeal — it’s mechanical problem-solving as entertainment, with real setbacks left in the final cut instead of edited out. Viewers who watched this rescue kept coming back to one detail that had nothing to do with horsepower or bodywork: Bieri wasn’t wrenching alone. Comment after comment on the video came from people who watched him work alongside his son and said it reminded them of learning wrenches and sockets from their own fathers — a reminder that these barn-find revivals resonate as much for what they preserve about family as for what they preserve about steel.
That authenticity has real value. Once this Barracuda was running and driving well enough to be listed as a project car, bidding quickly climbed past $7,100 — a price that reflects both the car’s potential and the audience Bieri has built around watching cars like it come back from the dead. For a fastback that spent 23 years quietly rotting in the Florida sun, that’s not a bad second act.
Cars like this Barracuda rarely survive on their own. Left alone in that Florida yard, this one was probably a season or two away from being too far gone to save — another first-generation pony car lost to time instead of preserved for it. Every abandoned project Bieri drags out of a field and gets running again is, in a small way, an argument that these cars are still worth the trouble, rust and bad smells included.
Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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