This Guy Lives Sideways In A Blown 1968 Hemi Dart!

Bob Welling served as a Marine in Vietnam, came home a died-in-the-wool Chevy guy, and still ended up chasing down a piece of 1968 Mopar history decades later. What started as a simple fix for an engine rattle turned into a full supercharged Hemi build — one so powerful that hitting the throttle at highway speed sends the rear end sideways. Read on to find out how a tribute to Dodge’s rarest factory drag cars became Bob’s daily street cruiser.

Bob Welling was a Chevy guy. He served as a U.S. Marine in Vietnam, came home, bought a ’66 SS396 Chevelle, then traded it for a Road Runner — and somewhere in that sequence, a factory-original piece of Mopar history from 1968 got its hooks into him anyway. Decades later, he’d finally chase it down in the form of a tribute build, only to discover that owning the car was the easy part. Getting it to behave once a supercharger entered the picture would turn out to be a completely different story — one that ends with the rear end trying to pass the front.

The Real 1968 Hemi Darts Were Never Meant for the Street

To understand why Bob’s car matters, you have to understand what happened at Dodge in 1968. Engineer Tom Hoover and his team at Chrysler Engineering launched what amounted to a factory drag-racing program: incomplete 383-spec Darts were shipped to subcontractor Hurst Industries, which stripped them down with lightweight body panels, spartan interiors, and the legendary cross-ram Race Hemi — the final factory release of that engine. Built specifically to fit the NHRA’s SS/B weight break of 6.00 to 6.49 pounds per horsepower, these cars were never street legal, and Hurst included a disclaimer to that effect with every sale. Roughly 80 of them were built, alongside a similar batch of Hemi Barracudas, and together they dominated the sport’s highest levels for years.

⚑ Featured Gear

Start Car Conversations →

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

From Vietnam to a Raceway Obsession

Bob’s connection to that history started before the Darts even existed. In 1965, a trip to the newly opened Palm Beach International Raceway sealed his love of horsepower, right before he shipped out to Vietnam as a Marine. “I was awestruck at how dominant the Hemi engine was,” he recalls of that first visit. He came home a Chevy man, bought a ’66 SS396 Chevelle, then traded it within six months for a 1969 383 Road Runner. It wasn’t until 2014, while looking to replace that long-gone Chevelle, that a Dart — carrying a later Mopar Performance 472 cubic-inch crate Hemi in tribute to the original racers — finally came up for sale.

A Rattle Led to a Blower

The car wasn’t originally meant to be a supercharged street machine. Bob bought it with a nagging piston rattle during warm-up, which sent him to mechanic Kenny Morrison at K-Tech Automotive in Loxahatchee, Florida. Kenny — a self-described “blower guy” who owns a supercharged ’56 Chevy, a blown ’34 Plymouth, and a blown Hemi Willys — took Bob for a ride in one of his own builds and talked him into the idea. “I always wanted a Hemi, and this would get that out of my system,” Bob says of his decision to let Kenny rework the engine rather than simply fix the rattle.

Building a Blower Setup That Stays Streetable

Kenny’s approach was deliberately restrained. He pulled the Hemi apart, swapped in a blower-friendly camshaft and a set of 10.0:1 compression Diamond pistons, then capped the combination with a Hampton intake feeding an 8-71 Roots-design supercharger — a huffer that now pokes up through the engine bay. Fuel comes from dual-quad 770cfm Holley carburetors, spark from an MSD ignition, and cooling from a Be Cool aluminum radiator with twin electric fans. “If you build them right, these cars are 100-percent drivable,” Kenny says, and the build reflects that philosophy: nothing about the combination is radical, just carefully matched parts meant to survive daily boost.

The Steel Hood That Fought Back

Because the Dart retained its original steel hood rather than a lightweight fiberglass piece, fitting the blower setup underneath became the project’s single biggest headache. The team removed the factory Super Stock scoop and had to cut and weld a new lip around the opening to clear the supercharger — work complicated by how much iron Chrysler used in its 1968 sheet metal. “It wanted to bend and flex every time the welder hit it,” Bob says. It’s a small detail, but it’s the kind of problem that only shows up when you’re trying to graft modern power onto a genuinely original body.

Where All That Torque Actually Goes

Adding boost to a Hemi exposes every weak point in a driveline, and K-Tech addressed them methodically: the 8.75-inch rear end was removed, narrowed four inches, and mini-tubbed to accommodate a 12-inch-wide tire. A 3.55 rear gear balances the power delivery, while a 3,200-stall torque converter and reverse-pattern valve body were added to the A727 TorqueFlite automatic. Five-spoke Rocket wheels wrapped in Mickey Thompson rubber handle the power at all four corners — though as Bob admits, even modest throttle application at highway speeds is enough to send the rear end sideways.

A Street Cruiser, Not a Racer, by Choice

Despite owning the pieces of a genuinely quick car, Bob has no interest in taking the Dart to the strip. He already raced a 2009 SRT Challenger twice weekly at Palm Beach International Raceway and eventually sold that dedicated race car, choosing instead to keep the Dart strictly as a street machine. “If you were to try and get it to really hook up, it would probably blow that rear end apart,” he says, an assessment that sounds less like a limitation and more like a design choice — the car is built to be driven hard on the street, not staged at the tree.

A Show Car With Race-Bred DNA

These days, the Dart makes at least two show appearances a month along Florida’s Atlantic coast during the season, its interior deliberately kept close to a 1968 Hurst Dart’s spartan character — factory dash layout, low-back bucket seats, and window cranks instead of power glass. It’s a car built around a contradiction: genuinely race-derived hardware wearing a body that most owners would never dream of driving sideways on purpose. For Bob, that contradiction is the entire point. Bob still trailers it occasionally for longer hauls, but most weekends it’s driven straight to the show field on its own supercharged power, whining the whole way there — proof that a genuinely race-descended combination can still function as reliable daily-driver hardware when it’s built by someone who understands the difference between a strip car and a street car.

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Republished by Blog Post Promoter