Every Mopar From The 2017 Grand National Roadster Show!

The 2017 Grand National Roadster Show filled the Pomona Fairplex with more than a thousand entries competing for the sport’s oldest indoor trophy, and the Mopar contingent that January refused to play by anyone’s rules. A green 1965 Dodge Dart from Alabama showed up carrying an engine that would not exist for another four decades. Here is what the Mopar side of the 68th GNRS actually looked like, and why one compact stole the show.

Every January, the Fairplex in Pomona fills with more than a thousand cars competing for bragging rights at what builders still call the grand daddy of them all, and for three straight days roughly 40,000 people walk aisles packed with roadsters, customs, restorations and racecars. The headline prize goes to a roadster, as it has since 1950, which means the Mopar contingent is almost never fighting for the trophy everyone photographs. That has never stopped Chrysler’s faithful from turning the surrounding halls into their own show inside the show. In 2017, one of those Mopars was a small green compact that had no business standing out among six figure customs, and yet the hood was open all weekend for a reason nobody could ignore.

Sixty-Eight Years of the Grand Daddy

Held January 27 through 29, 2017, the Grand National Roadster Show marked its 68th year, making it the longest running indoor car show in the country and one of the few events on the calendar that predates the muscle car era it now celebrates. The format has stayed remarkably consistent: builders trailer in finished cars, park them under bright light on carpet, and let judges crawl over every seam. That year’s America’s Most Beautiful Roadster award, the nine foot trophy that gives the event its reputation, went to a heavily modified 1936 Packard powered by a Lincoln V-12 and built by Troy Ladd at Hollywood Hot Rods. It was a reminder that the top prize almost always rewards prewar iron rather than anything with a Mopar badge.

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Why the Mopars Never Chase the Big Trophy

That mismatch is exactly why the Mopar entries at GNRS tend to be interesting rather than safe. Builders who know they are not going to win AMBR with a B-body stop chasing the judges and start chasing attention instead, which produces cars with harder engineering choices and stranger combinations than a points-driven show would ever encourage. Walk the Chrysler side of the 2017 halls and the pattern held: E-body Challengers and Barracudas built as pro-touring machines rather than concours restorations, Coronets and Super Bees running modern brakes under original sheet metal, and a scattering of A-bodies rebuilt into something the Chrysler engineers of the mid-sixties never sketched. The green Dart parked among them took that idea further than anything else in the room.

The Green Dart That Would Not Blend In

The car in question was a 1965 Dodge Dart out of Alabama, and the reason its hood stayed up was a modern Gen III 392 Hemi crate engine sitting where a slant six or a small block LA V8 originally lived. Bolted to it was a ProCharger centrifugal supercharger, an addition that turns an already stout crate motor into something genuinely violent, and the surrounding engine bay was filled with one-off fabricated parts rather than catalog pieces. The visual joke lands immediately: a 1965 economy compact, the kind of car Dodge sold to buyers who wanted cheap transportation, wearing an engine architecture Chrysler would not introduce until 2003. It is the sort of build that only reads as clever when the execution is clean enough to look factory.

A 1965 Compact With a 2003 Engine

That swap has become one of the defining moves of modern Mopar building, and the 1965 Dart is one of the better platforms for it. Chrysler’s A-body was light, narrow, and built on a unibody structure that responds well to modern subframe and suspension work, which means a Gen III Hemi does not simply overwhelm the car the way a 440 wedge would have in period. The current 392 crate engines are rated in the neighborhood of 485 horsepower in naturally aspirated form, and adding a centrifugal blower pushes that figure well past anything a factory Mopar ever advertised. What makes builds like this credible at a show of this caliber is not the horsepower number but whether the chassis, brakes and cooling were engineered to survive it.

Why the A-Body Takes a Gen III So Well

The rest of the Mopar presence that January covered the expected ground and did it well. Restored Road Runners and Chargers sat near modified Darts and Demons, a handful of Plymouth wagons and station-wagon-based customs turned up in the outer buildings, and the late model side contributed Hellcats and modern Challengers with their own aftermarket work. GNRS has always been a wide net rather than a narrow specialty show, and Chrysler products benefit from that: a Mopar owner can bring a survivor and park it near a full custom without either car looking out of place. That mix is a large part of why 40,000 people keep buying tickets rather than treating it as a builder-only event.

What Else Wore a Pentastar That Weekend

Judging at GNRS is worth understanding if the show is ever on your list. The AMBR competition is genuinely brutal, with a small field of qualified roadsters, cars often built over multiple years and budgets that regularly run into six or seven figures, and judges who inspect underside finish, wiring, chassis fabrication and panel gaps with the car on a rotisserie-style display. Everything else at the show is competing in class categories, which is where the Mopar entries live and where the practical bar is much closer to what a serious home builder can reach. That structure gives the event two very different audiences at once: people who came to see the untouchable cars, and people who came to see what they might actually be able to build.

How GNRS Judging Actually Works

For Chrysler fans specifically, GNRS matters because it is one of the few big-tent events where Mopars are judged against the whole hot rod world rather than against each other. A Dart with a blown 392 has to look right next to a Packard with a Lincoln V-12, and that comparison forces a higher standard of finish than a marque-specific show ever would. It also puts Mopar builds in front of an audience that skews toward Ford flatheads and small-block Chevys, which is exactly the audience worth converting. The green Dart from Alabama did more for that cause in one weekend than a hall full of correct-numbers restorations, simply by making people stop and ask what was under the hood.

What the 2017 Show Told Us About Where Mopars Were Headed

Nearly a decade later, the 2017 show reads as a snapshot of where the hobby was heading. The modern crate engine had already stopped being controversial, pro-touring builds were displacing concours restorations at the top of the custom world, and A-bodies were finally getting the attention that had gone to B and E-bodies for thirty years. Prices followed: clean 1965 through 1969 Darts that traded for pocket change in the 2000s now regularly clear five figures before a single modification, and finished Hemi-swapped examples ask considerably more. If you were looking for the moment the humble Dart stopped being a parts car and started being a project worth building properly, a green one in Pomona with a supercharged 392 is a reasonable place to point.

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