Kids restore dad’s 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T in memory of late mother

Richard Schmidt’s 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T convertible sat untouched for forty years after he and his late wife Kitty stopped using it as their everyday cruiser. His kids brought it back — not for the horsepower, but in her memory. Hagerty named the finished restoration its 2016 Classic of the Year, beating eleven other finalist stories. Watch the full story and see why one viewer called it ‘how to make a car guy cry 101.’

Richard Schmidt bought his 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T convertible new, and for a while it was exactly what a muscle car convertible is supposed to be — the car he and his wife Kitty used as their everyday cruiser. Then life happened. A growing family needed different priorities, and the Challenger went into storage, where it sat for four decades without turning a wheel. What brought it back out was not Richard. It was his kids, working to put it right again for a reason that has nothing to do with horsepower.

Forty Years in Storage

Four decades is an unusually long time for any car to sit untouched, even one stored properly, and the mechanical reality of that gap is significant — rubber seals, fuel lines, and brake components all degrade whether a car is driven or not, meaning a car parked in 1976 or so does not simply wake up and run in 2016. Bringing a Challenger back after that long a sleep means starting essentially from a mechanical zero, regardless of how clean the body and interior might have stayed.

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Why the Kids Took On the Project

Richard’s children took on the restoration specifically in memory of their late mother Kitty, turning what could have been a straightforward mechanical project into something considerably more personal. That motivation shapes every decision on a build like this — the goal is not simply to make the car run again, but to make it feel the way it did when their parents drove it together, before family responsibilities put it in storage for good.

What a 1970 Challenger R/T Convertible Actually Was

The Challenger R/T convertible represented the performance-and-openair combination Dodge built the R/T package specifically to deliver in 1970 — R/T badging meant a standard big-block engine and heavier-duty suspension components, while the convertible body style meant Dodge had to reinforce the chassis to compensate for the lost structural rigidity of a fixed roof. Very few 1970 Challenger convertibles were ordered with the R/T package at all, making Richard’s original purchase a deliberate choice for real performance, not just style.

Hagerty’s Classic of the Year Process

Hagerty collects stories like this one year-round from the hundreds of employees who talk directly with collector car owners as part of the company’s insurance business, then lets the entire company vote monthly on a favorite, which becomes that month’s Classic of the Month. At year’s end, the twelve monthly winners compete for Classic of the Year — meaning this Challenger’s restoration story beat out eleven other finalists that Hagerty’s own staff considered compelling enough to spotlight first.

The Emotional Weight the Comments Section Carried

The top comment on this video reads simply: how to make a car guy cry 101. It is a blunt reaction, but it captures something real about why this particular restoration resonated far beyond typical car-build content — the emotional stakes of finishing a project in memory of a parent land differently than a build focused purely on horsepower numbers or paint quality, and viewers responded to that difference directly.

Storage Versus Restoration: The Real Cost of Waiting Decades

Every year a car spends in long-term storage adds to the eventual restoration bill in ways that are not always obvious up front — fuel system components gum up and often need full replacement rather than cleaning, rubber perishes uniformly throughout the car, and even electrical connections can corrode enough to require a full rewiring in the worst cases. A restoration after forty years of storage is rarely just a cosmetic refresh; it is frequently closer to a ground-up rebuild wearing an intact original body.

Why This Story Beat Eleven Other Finalists

Hagerty’s own description of this restoration calls it proof that being surrounded by people who love you is enough to move mountains, and restore an old Dodge. That framing matters — this Classic of the Year selection was not chosen because the Challenger R/T convertible is objectively the most desirable Mopar of 1970, but because the story behind why it got restored, and who did the restoring, said something Hagerty’s judges felt was worth putting in front of their entire audience.

What Hagerty’s Business Model Reveals About Collector Sentiment

Hagerty built its business specifically around insuring collector and classic vehicles, a niche that requires the company’s staff to understand these cars, and the people who own them, in ways a mainstream auto insurer never has to. Running an internal program where employees nominate and vote on their favorite client stories, culminating in a company-wide Classic of the Year, is not simply a marketing exercise — it reflects a business built on the premise that a collector car’s value is inseparable from its story, not just its condition or rarity. Insurers in this space routinely have to make judgment calls about agreed value coverage, which depends heavily on documentation, history, and provenance rather than a standardized depreciation table the way mainstream auto insurance works. A restoration story like Richard Schmidt’s Challenger, undertaken by his children in his late wife’s memory, is exactly the kind of provenance that matters most to Hagerty’s own underwriting philosophy — cars with documented emotional and family history often command more attention, and eventually more coverage value, than an anonymous, if mechanically identical, example with no known story attached. That is part of why this particular restoration made sense as Hagerty’s flagship story of the year, beyond the car itself. Dodge built the Challenger on a stretched version of the Barracuda’s E-body platform specifically to give the car a longer wheelbase and more conventional proportions than its Plymouth cousin, a decision aimed at buyers who wanted Mopar performance without the E-body Barracuda’s tighter, more compact stance. That distinction shaped how the Challenger R/T convertible was marketed in period — as a genuine grand touring muscle car rather than a pure pony car — which lines up closely with how Richard and Kitty Schmidt reportedly used theirs, as an everyday cruiser rather than a dedicated track or show car.

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