Dodge Built the 1968 Hemi Dart Purely to Win Drag Races — Its Owner Pulled the Rare Factory Engine to Go Even Faster

Only around 80 of these Hurst-built Hemi Darts ever left the Hamtramck factory in 1968, stripped to the bone for one job: winning NHRA Super Stock races. One surviving example just turned up at a South Dakota drag strip running a 9.20 at 146 mph — except its owner pulled the rare original 426 Hemi for something even bigger. Here’s why that was actually the right call.

In 1968, Dodge handed Hurst Performance a short list of instructions for turning a compact Dart into a factory-built race car: strip it down, drop in the most powerful engine Chrysler made, and forget about comfort entirely. The result was the LO23 Hemi Dart, one of roughly 80 cars built purely to dominate NHRA Super Stock competition — no back seat padding, no radio, acid-dipped doors to shave pounds. Nearly six decades later, a surviving example turned up at Thunder Valley Dragways in South Dakota, and its owner made a decision that seems to defy logic: he pulled the rare, numbers-matching 426 Hemi out of the car entirely. What he put in its place, and why, says a lot about what it actually takes to keep a piece of drag racing history alive — and fast.

A Race Car Dodge Never Meant to Be Comfortable

The footage comes from the YouTube channel DakotaGT, filmed from the driver’s seat as the car rips down the strip at Thunder Valley Dragways in Marion, South Dakota, on August 11, 2019. The Dart’s nose lifts and the steering wheel visibly fights the torque off the line as the car launches, eventually crossing the stripe at roughly a 9.20-something elapsed time at well over 146 mph. The driver explains in the video’s description that the run was part of a suspension-tuning session — the shift points, transbrake, and chassis setup were all still being dialed in, which means the car had more left in it.

What makes the footage worth watching isn’t just the speed — it’s what’s actually under the hood. This is not the factory-original 426 Hemi that left Hamtramck Assembly in 1968. That engine has been pulled and set aside for safekeeping. In its place sits an all-aluminum 604-cubic-inch Hemi, a far larger and more modern engine built for exactly this kind of abuse. The owner says the car should eventually run 8.80s at over 150 mph once it’s fully sorted — numbers that would have seemed impossible even to the factory race teams that built this car’s reputation in the first place. It’s the kind of video that only works because the person behind the camera actually owns and races the car himself, rather than just showing it off at a cruise night. Large aluminum Hemi-based crate engines like the 604 have become a popular route for exactly this reason among vintage drag racers: they deliver far more displacement and far less weight than an original cast-iron Hemi block, which is part of why so many original-car owners choose to retire the factory engine rather than risk it on every pass.

⚑ Featured Gear

Start Car Conversations →

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Inside Hurst’s 1968 Weight-Loss Program

The LO23 Hemi Dart wasn’t built for anyone who wanted a fast street car. In early 1968, Chrysler greenlit a run of purpose-built Super Stock drag cars, splitting the work between two models: the Plymouth Barracuda, under the factory code BO29, and the Dodge Dart, under the code LO23. Dodge’s own company history puts total LO23 production at 80 cars, all assembled at the Hamtramck Assembly Plant in Michigan between February and May of 1968; some Mopar historians, citing period production records, put the number slightly higher, around 83. Either way, these were never meant to be common cars — Dodge built them to win races, not to move volume through dealer lots. The Barracuda got the same treatment on a different platform, which meant Chrysler was effectively fielding two near-identical weapons in the same drag racing war at once.

Every Hemi Dart left the factory with the 426 Race Hemi, officially rated at 425 horsepower but widely believed by period experts to have produced considerably more once you accounted for how conservatively factories rated race engines in that era. The engine ran a 12.5:1 compression ratio, an aluminum cross-ram intake manifold, and twin Holley 770-cfm four-barrel carburetors. To get the car into a weight class where that much power could actually win, Hurst Performance went to extreme lengths everywhere else: fiberglass front fenders and hood, acid-dipped doors thinned down to save pounds, and lightweight front bumpers. Hooker headers routed the exhaust, and buyers could order either a TorqueFlite automatic or an A-833 four-speed manual. Nothing about the car was built around comfort — there was no sound insulation, no back seat padding, and none of the interior trim a regular Dart buyer would have expected. Every pound Hurst could strip out was a pound the 426 Hemi didn’t have to drag down the strip.

Once these cars reached Dodge’s factory-backed Super Stock racers — names like “Dandy” Dick Landy among them — they didn’t waste time proving the investment was worth it. Period reports have the Hemi Darts running into the low-10-second range at around 130 mph, numbers that made them among the fastest doorslammers in NHRA competition that year. They weren’t racing in a vacuum, either: that same season, Ford countered with its own stripped-down factory specials, building roughly 50 lightweight 1968 Mustang fastbacks specifically to qualify the new 428 Cobra Jet engine for NHRA stock classes. Ford’s cars debuted at the 1968 NHRA Winternationals aiming squarely at Mopar’s stock-class dominance, which tells you how seriously Detroit’s factories were taking these niche, low-volume race specials by that point — building whole limited runs of cars with no purpose on earth except winning a national event.

What a Real Hemi Dart Is Worth to Collectors Today

With only around 80 LO23 Darts built, and plenty of them lost, raced into the ground, or converted into tribute cars over the decades, surviving original examples have become some of the most sought-after Mopars on the collector market. A Dick Landy-campaigned LO23 crossed the block at Mecum’s Harrisburg auction for $220,000 including buyer’s premium, and other documented LO23 cars have traded hands anywhere from the $150,000 range up toward $300,000 or more at Mecum auctions in recent years, depending on provenance, race history, and originality. That context matters here: the car in this video is confirmed by its owner to be one of the genuine 80, not a clone built from a standard Dart shell — which is exactly why he treats the original drivetrain like a museum piece rather than a daily racer.

Why Pulling a Rare Hemi Was Actually the Smart Move

What makes this car’s story land so well with viewers isn’t the factory spec sheet — it’s the decision its current owner made with it. Pulling a numbers-matching 426 Race Hemi out of a car with only around 80 ever built sounds like sacrilege until you think it through: that original engine is irreplaceable, and running it hard, pass after pass, risks damaging a piece of history that can never be bought back. Swapping in an all-aluminum 604-cubic-inch Hemi means the owner can actually use the car the way Dodge and Hurst built it to be used — flat to the floor down a drag strip — without putting the original engine at risk of a blown head gasket or a thrown rod a thousand miles from the nearest replacement part.

Commenters on the video, many of them longtime Mopar fans, picked up on exactly that trade-off, with several calling it one of the smartest ways they’ve seen to keep a rare factory race car alive instead of parking it in a climate-controlled garage where nobody ever hears it run. More than one pointed to the way the steering wheel cocks hard to the side under full throttle — a small detail that says everything about how much torque is actually reaching the pavement through that old TorqueFlite automatic, built decades before anyone was using a transbrake to manage a nine-second pass on purpose.

It’s a reminder of what these cars were actually built to do. Dodge and Hurst didn’t design the LO23 Hemi Dart to sit still, and more than fifty years later, at least one of the roughly 80 that exist is still proving the point — just with a bigger heart doing the work, while the original stays safe for the day it’s needed again.

That’s also why this kind of footage keeps circulating years after it was filmed. The LO23 Hemi Dart occupies a strange spot in muscle car history: famous enough that serious enthusiasts instantly recognize the name, rare enough that most of them will never stand next to a real one, and purpose-built enough that almost nobody who owns one treats it like an ordinary classic car. Seeing one still making full passes down a drag strip, steering wheel fighting the driver’s hands the whole way, is as close as most fans will ever get to experiencing what Dodge and Hurst were actually trying to build back in 1968 — a car with exactly one job, and nothing else to get in the way of doing it.

Watch the full video above and let us know your thoughts in the comments.