Posts Tagged: Plymouth Barracuda
Peter Swainson’s private Mopar collection includes a run of 1969-1971 Challengers and ‘Cudas, with a handful crossing the block at Mecum’s record $193 million Indy sale. Here’s why the final year of the Barracuda’s E-body run — the one with the engine options stripped away — is the one collectors want most.
Plymouth beat Ford to showrooms by two weeks with the 1964 Barracuda, then spent a decade playing catch-up anyway. See how a Valiant-based fastback with the biggest curved rear window ever installed on a production car turned into the Hemi ‘Cuda — a car so rare that one convertible sold at auction for $3.5 million.
The 1970 Plymouth Barracuda abandoned its compact roots entirely for the new E-body platform, a wider and lower chassis designed from the start to swallow big-block engines. Nine engines were offered, from a 145-horsepower slant six to the 426 Street Hemi, and production jumped more than 70 percent. Yet fewer than a thousand buyers checked the box for the engine that made the car legendary. Read on for the numbers behind one of Detroit’s sharpest designs.
A stranger bought this 1965 Plymouth Barracuda without ever seeing it, betting on a car that had sat untouched for roughly two decades. It’s the same model that beat the Mustang to dealerships by sixteen days and wore the largest single piece of glass ever installed on a production car. Here’s the real story behind Plymouth’s original pony car, and what it actually takes to wake one back up.
Long before The Dukes of Hazzard turned a 1969 Charger into the General Lee, Dodge had already built one of the best-designed muscle cars of the era, with an engine lineup broad enough to include a version most buyers never even knew existed. From a color-coded engine bay to a sunroof option only 260 buyers ever ordered, the second-generation Charger’s story is full of details even devoted fans overlook. Read on to find out what made it so special.
Plymouth built the 1971 ‘Cuda with a look it never repeated: quad headlights, fender gills, and billboard graphics found on no other year. UFC president Dana White picked exactly this rare-bodied ‘Cuda for a full restomod, swapping in a 425-horsepower 440 and a Curry 9-inch rear end. The result became one of MuscleCar’s most-watched builds ever.
This 1970 Plymouth ‘Cuda convertible has been reduced to a bare shell, a stripped cowl, and one stamped fender tag — yet collectors are still willing to pay close to $20,000 for it. The reason comes down to rarity: Plymouth built just 635 ‘Cuda convertibles in 1970, and fewer than one percent wore the High Impact Sassy Grass Green paint this one supposedly left the factory in. Backyard Barn Finds documents the deal as it happens, tag and all. Watch to see why a car that can’t be driven is still worth fighting over.
Plymouth never built a 550-horsepower Barracuda — the factory ceiling topped out well under 400 horsepower even at its 1970 peak. So when a modern supercharged build shows up making 550 horsepower and a whine that turns heads at idle, it is finishing a story the factory never got the chance to write. Read on to find out just how far builders have pushed this compact pony car’s engine bay decades after Plymouth stopped building it.