Saved From The Crusher: A ’69 Daytona’s Amazing Story!

A 1969 Dodge Daytona spent nine years sitting in a Kansas City junkyard, one of roughly fifty impounded cars slowly waiting their turn at the crusher after a used-car dealer’s title fraud scheme collapsed. One collector’s memory of a Richard Petty magazine ad is the only reason it still exists, and the deal he struck to save it was stranger than most restoration stories get. Read on for how it ended up winning a Concours Gold award decades later.

Everywhere you look lately, someone claims to have found a barn-find muscle car worth six figures. This story is not that. It is about a Dodge Daytona that spent nine years sitting in a Kansas City junkyard as the direct result of a used-car dealer’s fraud scheme, surrounded by roughly fifty other impounded cars, including a genuine Hemi Charger 500, all of them slowly waiting their turn at the crusher. One collector’s obsession with a magazine advertisement he had seen years earlier is the only reason this particular Daytona still exists today, and the deal he had to strike to save it was stranger than most restoration stories get.

Fifty Impounded Cars and One Corrupt Dealer

The Daytona’s saga began in 1973, when it ended up alongside roughly fifty other vehicles at a Kansas City, Missouri auto parts yard, all impounded by the state after a used car dealer was caught running a scheme built on bogus titles. That dealer ended up in jail, and the cars sat in legal limbo for years while storage bills piled up against a yard owner who had already lost his shirt on the arrangement. By the time ownership was finally settled in the early 1980s, the yard’s owner had no interest in continuing to store dozens of unsellable cars and moved to send them to the crusher, a fate that had already claimed most of the collection before word got out to Mopar collectors.

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A Magazine Ad That Started an Obsession

The collector at the center of this story, identified only as John, had been drag racing a Plymouth GTX until a scary run around the track’s rim nearly rolled the car and ended his interest in racing for good. Flipping through old issues of Hot Rod magazine looking for a new project, he found an advertisement for the 1970 Plymouth Superbird featuring driver Richard Petty, and instantly knew he needed one. That single ad reshaped his entire collecting path, eventually leading him into the Daytona Superbird car club, where more experienced members introduced him to the Daytona, the car that had actually preceded the Superbird by a full model year.

Learning the Daytona Predates the More Famous Superbird

At his first club meeting, John saw a winged, nose-coned Dodge Charger pull up and had no idea what he was looking at. Veteran members explained that the Daytona had come first, in 1969, with production capped at just 503 units to satisfy NASCAR’s homologation rules, compared to 1,920 Superbirds built the following year for Plymouth. Those low numbers, mandated purely so the cars could legally race, meant that Daytonas were rarer than the Superbird most casual fans recognize instantly, and John’s fascination with the earlier, lesser-known car only grew once he understood exactly how scarce it actually was.

Two Daytonas, One Price, No Choice

In 1982, a fellow club member tipped John off that a junkyard had two Daytonas sitting among cars destined for the crusher. When John called about the red one he wanted, the yard owner told him he had to buy both cars for $5,500 total, insisting there were too many parts missing between them to make one complete car without the other, though the real reason was that he did not want to get stuck with an unsellable leftover if he sold only one. John agreed, even though he considered the blue car ugly at the time, a decision he would eventually reverse completely once restoration work began decades later.

What Twenty Thousand Original Miles Actually Looked Like

Both Daytonas turned out to be strikingly similar under the surface, still wearing their original paint with barely over 20,000 miles on their odometers, original 440-cubic-inch four-barrel engines, and 727 TorqueFlite automatic transmissions intact. The red car was finished in R4 Charger Red with a black interior, while the blue car wore rarer B5 Bright Blue Poly paint with a blue interior and the unusual buddy-seat front bench option, making it the more valuable of the pair despite John’s initial preference for the red one. Years of vandalism and forklift damage from repeated moves around the yard had taken a visible toll on both cars.

Selling One Superbird to Save Both Daytonas

Raising $5,500 in early-1980s cash meant John had to sell off one of his existing Plymouth Superbirds to cover the purchase, a trade he made without much hesitation once he understood what he was getting in return. He hauled a trailer to the yard, loaded up the red Daytona first, and promised to return quickly for the blue one. Two weeks later the yard owner called insisting the blue car needed to go immediately, and a friend of John’s bought it as a stopgap before financial troubles forced him to sell it back to John shortly afterward, reuniting both Daytonas under one owner.

A Casual Conversation at a Car Show

For roughly 25 years, John simply collected NOS parts for both cars rather than starting a restoration, until his wife Linda encouraged him to finally commit to finishing one. In 2007 he began restoring the rarer blue Daytona to concours-level originality, later applying the same standard to his 440 six-barrel Superbird. The red Daytona’s path to a new owner started as small talk at the 2015 MCACN show between Rhode Island restoration shop owner Mike Mancini and a customer named Joe Iourio, who had dreamed of owning a Daytona since childhood. John’s name came up in conversation, and Mancini flew to Indiana himself to inspect the car before the sale was finalized.

Rebuilding a Car That Was Never Built Neatly

Mancini’s inspection found a largely unmolested car, still wearing factory paint and instruments, with a substantial cache of NOS parts included in the sale that saved his shop significant time and expense. Restoring a Daytona properly means first restoring it as a standard Charger R/T, then replicating the outside conversion work originally performed by an outside vendor, Creative Industries, that hastily bolted on the nose cone and rear window plug at the factory. Ironically, the hardest part of a correct restoration is deliberately recreating the factory’s original sloppiness, since Daytonas were assembled quickly and imperfectly on a tight production schedule.

The Concours Gold That Closed the Story

Teardown on the red Daytona began in 2016 with a goal of finishing in time for the 2017 MCACN show, and the biggest single obstacle was repairing a trunk lid that thieves had pried open decades earlier to steal the rear wing. The finished car debuted first at the 2017 Carlisle Chrysler Nationals before returning to MCACN as a featured unveiling, where it took home a Concours Gold award. Of the roughly fifty cars originally impounded alongside it in that Kansas City yard, few if any others survived; this Daytona’s rescue depended entirely on one collector’s decades-old memory of a magazine advertisement.

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