It looks “Cuda” on the outside, but just check the inside?! Amazing!

From the outside it reads as a pearl orange Plymouth Cuda with a Hemi under the shaker, which is already a serious thing to own. Look through the driver’s window and the story changes completely, because the steering wheel is on the wrong side. Schwartz Performance built this E-body for an owner in India, and moving the wheel turned out to be the smallest part of the job. Read on to find out what had to move with it.

Building a fast Mopar is a known quantity. There are catalogs for it, forums for it, and shops that will quote you a number over the phone. Building a fast Mopar that has to work on the opposite side of the road from every other Cuda ever assembled is a different conversation entirely, and most shops would politely decline to have it. Schwartz Performance said yes, and what came back out of the shop did not simply satisfy a customer eight thousand miles away, it collected one of the industry’s highest builder honors. The steering wheel was never the hard part. Almost everything underneath it had to move too.

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The Shop That Took the Call

Schwartz Performance operates out of Woodstock, Illinois, and built its reputation manufacturing bolt-in G-Machine chassis for classic muscle cars long before it became known for complete custom builds. The G-Machine business meant the shop already thought in terms of full structures rather than individual brackets, replacing a car’s original front subframe and suspension geometry with a purpose-engineered platform. That mindset turns out to matter enormously for a project like this one. A shop that only bolts parts to a factory floorpan has very little room to negotiate. A shop that designs the floorpan can put the steering wherever the customer needs it.

Why the Steering Wheel Was the Easy Part

Every Chrysler E-body, Cuda included, was engineered around a drivetrain and transmission tunnel offset toward what North American drivers call the passenger side, specifically to clear the steering column on the left. It is a packaging decision almost no owner ever notices, because it only becomes visible when someone tries to reverse it. Converting the car to right-hand drive meant Schwartz could not simply relocate a column and a rack. New floorboards, a re-fabricated transmission tunnel, and the entire steering path all had to be re-engineered and shifted left so the wheel could move right, which amounts to re-solving a packaging problem Chrysler’s engineers closed out more than fifty years ago.

What Makes an E-Body an E-Body

The E-body platform arrived for 1970 and carried the Plymouth Barracuda and Cuda alongside the Dodge Challenger through 1974, giving Chrysler a short, wide pony car with enough engine bay to swallow anything in the corporate catalog. That last point is the whole story of the car’s reputation. The Cuda could be ordered with everything from a mild small block up to the 426 Hemi, and the wide-body proportions that made it look aggressive were originally a consequence of making room for those big engines. Fifty years later, those same proportions are why builders keep choosing E-bodies as the starting point for expensive projects.

The Chassis Underneath the Orange Paint

A build at this level rarely keeps much of the original chassis, and that is deliberate rather than disrespectful. Factory E-bodies used torsion-bar front suspension and leaf springs at the rear, an arrangement that worked well enough in 1970 and works poorly against modern tires and modern brakes. Replacing it with a fully engineered chassis brings coilovers, a rack-and-pinion steering system, and the geometry to actually use contemporary rubber. It also, crucially, gives the builder control over where the steering rack sits. On this car the modern chassis was not just a performance upgrade, it was the thing that made a right-hand-drive conversion practical at all.

A Hemi With a Different Job Description

The Hemi name carries weight for good reason. Chrysler’s 426 was the engine that made the Cuda a legend and the reason genuine Hemi cars now trade for sums that make collectors flinch, with 1970 Hemi Cuda production running to only a few hundred hardtops and barely more than a dozen convertibles. In a build like this one the Hemi is not serving as a numbers-matching artifact to be preserved, it is there to be used, backed by a modern driveline and suspension capable of putting the output down. That is a very different job than the one the original engines were asked to do.

Why India Changes Everything

India requires right-hand drive, and that single regulatory fact reshapes the entire project. An owner there cannot simply import an American muscle car and enjoy it, because a left-hand-drive car on Indian roads puts the driver on the blind side of every overtake, every intersection, and every narrow lane. The conversion is not a styling preference, it is the difference between a car that can be driven and a car that has to be admired in a garage. That context explains why a customer would fund a fabrication job of this magnitude rather than shipping over a car and living with the compromise.

The Award That Followed

The build went on to earn Schwartz Performance the Car Craft Pro-Builder of the Year award at the Car Craft Summer Nationals, the second time the shop had taken that honor. Awards in this corner of the industry tend to reward difficulty as much as finish quality, and a right-hand-drive E-body is about as difficult as a street car project gets short of a full ground-up one-off. The recognition also served a practical purpose for the shop, marking it publicly as a place willing to accept work that other builders turn down, which is exactly the kind of reputation that generates the next impossible phone call.

Why Cudas Attract This Kind of Money

Cudas occupy a particular position in muscle car values because the supply was never large and the attrition was severe. These were young men’s cars sold into an era of cheap fuel and expensive insurance, and a great many of them were crashed, rusted, or parted out long before anyone thought of them as collectible. The survivors, especially the high-option cars, now sit near the top of the American muscle market. That scarcity cuts both ways for builders: it means the starting shell is expensive, and it means any decision to modify rather than restore invites an argument from somebody.

Restomod Versus Restoration

That argument is worth taking seriously, because a restoration and a restomod answer different questions. A concours restoration preserves what the factory did, including the compromises, and its value comes from accuracy. A build like this one discards accuracy in favor of usability, which is precisely what an owner who intends to actually drive the car on real roads in another hemisphere requires. Neither approach is wrong, but they are not interchangeable, and the moment a car receives a re-engineered chassis and a relocated steering system, it has permanently chosen a side. This Cuda chose to be driven.

The Part Photographs Cannot Show

What photographs of this car cannot convey is how much of the work is invisible. The pearl orange paint and the stance photograph beautifully, and the shaker hood reads instantly as Mopar. None of that is the achievement. The achievement sits under the carpet: fabricated floorpans, a relocated tunnel, a steering system routed through space that Chrysler filled with something else, and a driveline packaged around all of it without the finished car feeling like a compromise. It looks Cuda on the outside because that was the easy half of the assignment.

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