Richard Rawlings Found Three 1970 Dodge Challengers Hiding in the Same Barn — And the Negotiation to Buy Them Got Intense

Richard Rawlings’ crew stumbled onto three 1970 Dodge Challengers parked together in one barn — one still wearing a screaming factory “High Impact” color. That’s just the start: a rare L78 big-block Chevelle and a Monte Carlo buried for 40 years turn up on the same trip.

Most barn find hunters count themselves lucky to land one forgotten muscle car worth the drive. Richard Rawlings and the Gas Monkey Garage crew found three in a single building — a trio of 1970 Dodge Challengers left parked for decades, one of them still wearing a factory High Impact paint job loud enough to survive years under dust. It’s the centerpiece of a new hunting compilation that has the Dallas-based crew crisscrossing the country for hidden American muscle, and the Challengers aren’t even the only heavy hitter. The same trip turns up a patina-caked 1968 Pontiac GTO, a 1974 Monte Carlo that spent 40 years buried behind a garage door nobody had opened, and a Chevelle SS carrying one of the rarest big-block options Chevrolet ever offered. Every stop comes with its own haggling and its own gamble on whether a rusted survivor is a resurrection project or a money pit. By the time the credits roll, Rawlings has written checks for cars most people would have walked straight past.

The video stitches together several separate hunts from Gas Monkey Garage’s recent travels. It opens with Rawlings working a package deal on a 1979 Chevrolet Camaro and a 1976 Chevy Nova — the kind of two-for-one negotiation that seasoned barn-find buyers actually prefer, since a seller looking to clear out a whole lot at once will often deal on price in a way they never would car by car. From there, the crew tracks down a 1974 Chevrolet Monte Carlo that had been sealed away in a garage for four decades — a rust-free survivor the team has to physically excavate before anyone can even assess what they’re looking at. A road trip for a 1968 Pontiac GTO follows, with the crew inspecting a car so heavily weathered that its patina has become part of the appeal rather than something to strip away and repaint.

The most dramatic stretch of the video is what the crew itself bills as an “ultimate Mopar barn find”: three 1970 Dodge Challengers, discovered together in the same building, with one wearing a factory High Impact color and packing a 383 four-speed drivetrain. Rawlings and the team spend real time working the numbers on this one — the segment is literally titled “Intense Negotiation for the Triple Dodge Challenger Hoard,” and it shows. Along the way, the crew also chases down a rare L78 big-block Chevelle SS, walks through how to verify an original GM build sheet, and puts a $40,000 offer on a stash of rare Chevelle parts and cars before wrapping with a 1979 Pontiac Trans Am and a tornado-damaged Chevelle SS. That $40,000 parts-lot offer is its own small lesson in the hobby: original sheet metal, date-coded engine blocks, and NOS trim pieces for a car like the Chevelle SS have become nearly as valuable as a complete running example, since so many original parts have already been used up keeping other restorations alive.

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Why Three 1970 Challengers in One Barn Is Such a Big Deal

The 1970 Dodge Challenger sits near the top of most muscle car collectors’ wish lists, and the “High Impact” color palette Chrysler rolled out that model year is a huge part of why. Colors like Plum Crazy purple, Go Mango orange, Sublime green, and Panther Pink were built to be impossible to ignore on the street, and today they’re some of the most sought-after paint codes in the hobby — Plum Crazy and Sublime were both available for the 1970 model year, making a numbers-matching Challenger in one of those colors a genuine trophy find. Pair a factory High Impact color with an R/T-spec 383 Magnum V8 — good for 335 horsepower and 425 lb-ft of torque with a four-speed manual, enough for a 7.8-second 0-to-60 run and a quarter mile in the mid-15s according to period road tests — and you’ve got a combination that turns a barn-dust survivor into a car worth a serious restoration budget. That’s likely exactly why three of them sitting in one building was worth an intense negotiation instead of a quick handshake and a check.

The rare Chevelle SS the crew chases down is arguably just as significant. Chevrolet’s L78 option added a 396-cubic-inch big block rated at 375 horsepower and 415 lb-ft of torque, built with four-bolt mains, big-valve rectangular-port heads, and a mechanical-lifter camshaft — genuine race-bred hardware wearing a Chevelle badge. It was the highest-horsepower engine Chevrolet offered in its intermediate lineup for most of the late 1960s, and Chevrolet was already phasing it out by 1970; only 2,144 Chevelle Super Sports were built with the L78 396/375-hp engine that final year. Finding one — even buried under a pile of parts — is the kind of discovery barn-find hunters chase for years without ever landing.

The 1968 GTO tells a different but equally important story. Pontiac completely redesigned its GTO for 1968, wrapping it in curvier semi-fastback bodywork, hiding the headlights, and introducing the now-famous Endura color-matched front bumper that could absorb a low-speed impact and bounce back into shape. The standard 400-cubic-inch V8 was rated at 350 horsepower that year, with the optional Ram Air packages pushing well past that — serious numbers for a car that, four years earlier, had essentially invented the muscle car category. Leaving that GTO’s patina alone rather than stripping it for a repaint also tracks with where a lot of the hobby has moved in recent years: original, honest paint and an untouched interior have become their own kind of bragging rights at shows, valued by plenty of collectors right alongside a fresh restoration. A 1974 Monte Carlo, by contrast, represents a different chapter of GM performance — the personal-luxury era that followed — but a genuinely rust-free example that’s been sealed away for 40 years is still a legitimately rare survivor, regardless of which side of the muscle-car-versus-luxury-coupe debate it falls on.

Rawlings has been doing this kind of hunting for over two decades. He founded Gas Monkey Garage in Dallas in 2002, years before reality television turned barn-find hunting into a genre of its own, and the shop became a household name once Discovery Channel’s “Fast N’ Loud” ran from 2012 to 2020. Rawlings also holds the outright speed record for the Cannonball Run, having driven the 2,811-mile coast-to-coast route from New York to Los Angeles in under 32 hours. That combination of car-guy credibility and cross-country hustle is exactly what this compilation trades on — it’s not staged discovery, it’s the same formula that built the shop’s reputation in the first place, and it’s a big part of why fans keep tuning in even after the cameras moved on from Discovery.

A Compilation Built for Barn-Find Junkies

The video’s final stretch adds two more finds worth knowing about. The 1979 Pontiac Trans Am the crew picks up arrives during the nameplate’s absolute commercial peak — 1979 was the best sales year the Trans Am ever had, with 117,108 units sold nationwide, largely on the strength of “Smokey and the Bandit” fever that was still driving showroom traffic two years after the film’s release. That single model year alone accounted for a huge share of second-generation Firebird production, which is part of why clean, unmolested 1979 Trans Ams are still relatively easy to find compared with the earlier, lower-production Bandit-era cars from 1977. And the tornado-damaged Chevelle SS that closes out the trip is a reminder that not every barn find survives nature intact; storm damage adds a whole different category of repair to the restoration math compared with simple neglect, since a crew has to sort out what the years did versus what the weather did in a single afternoon, and the two problems don’t always have the same fix.

What makes this compilation worth the watch time isn’t any single car — it’s the density of finds packed into one trip. In under an hour, the crew negotiates a Camaro-and-Nova package deal, excavates a buried Monte Carlo, inspects a patina GTO, lands three High-Impact-era Challengers at once, chases down a numbers-rare L78 Chevelle, puts real money on a rare-parts hoard, and still has time left for a 1979 Trans Am and a storm-damaged Chevelle SS. It’s a reminder of just how much hidden muscle is still sitting in garages and barns across the country, waiting on someone willing to make the drive, knock on the door, and do the digging. Every one of these cars was minutes from being scrapped, parted out, or simply forgotten for another decade — and instead, all of them are headed back to a shop where they’ll actually run again, get real mechanical attention, and eventually get driven the way their factory engineers intended. Whether that means a numbers-matching restoration back to showroom spec or simply enough mechanical work to drive it safely to a cars-and-coffee meet, every car in this compilation is closer to running again today than it’s been in decades. As the video’s own description puts it: which one would you bring back to life first?

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