This 1970 Plymouth ‘Cuda Restomod Beat Two Rival Designs With One Bold Idea — Quad Headlights No ‘Cuda Ever Wore

A three-way design vote on a 1970 Plymouth ‘Cuda restomod just took a hard left turn: instead of a classic orange or period-correct blue scheme, the build team picked a modern quad-headlight front end nobody expected. Here’s why that call matters on a car with only 14 factory Hemi convertibles ever built, and where Project CudaCat heads next.

Three designers walked into a garage with three completely different visions for the same car — and only one could survive the vote. In Episode 3 of Corky’s Classics, the crew behind Project CudaCat unveiled dueling design concepts for their 1970 Plymouth ‘Cuda restomod build: a classic orange retro look, a traditional B5 Blue take, and a radically modern “sinister elegance” pitch built around a detail this E-body has rarely worn in its 56-year history — quad headlights. When the cover came off the winning concept, the reaction in the shop, and in the comments since, has been the same: nobody expected the underdog pitch to win, and nobody expected it to look this right. The car at the center of it all is no ordinary ‘Cuda, either; it’s a body that spent hundreds of hours in strip-down, repair, and a full chemical dip in rural North Carolina before anyone even sketched a design. What the team chose next will decide what one of the most collectible muscle car platforms in America looks like when it rolls toward SEMA.

The Vote That Decided Project CudaCat’s Future

The build team — Corky Ullom, Rob “BulletProof Solutions” Hauger, Daniella “Tatted Cat” Johnson, and Adam Dimar — had already put in the unglamorous work by the time Episode 3 opens. Rob walks through the hours spent stripping the Cuda’s body down to bare metal, repairing decades of damage, and hauling the shell to rural North Carolina for a full chemical dip to strip it clean before any paint or design work could even begin. That’s the part of a restomod build most videos skip past, and it’s also what makes the design reveal land harder: this wasn’t a mockup slapped on a fresh shell, it was a car the team had already earned the right to reimagine.

With the body finally clean, the team put three competing directions on the table. Corky pitched a classic orange scheme leaning into the ‘Cuda’s factory-era Mopar heritage. Rob countered with a more traditional B5 Blue approach, a color straight out of Chrysler’s high-impact palette. Then Daniella “Tatted Cat” Johnson presented the wild card: a modern design built around one idea she called “sinister elegance,” anchored by a quad-headlight front end unlike anything the model wore from the factory. Viewers in the comments zeroed in immediately — one wrote they’d “never seen a 70 Cuda with 4 headlights” — and by the team’s own account, that design is the one that changed the room. The vote settled it, and Episode 3 ends with fabrication about to begin in earnest.

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Project CudaCat is the centerpiece of Corky’s Classics’ first season, and the format itself is part of why the design reveal carries so much weight with viewers. Rather than compressing a build into a single before-and-after reveal, the series is documenting every decision in real time — the stripped shell, the chemical dip, the pitch meeting, the vote — so the audience is invested in the process, not just the finished product. That structure is also why a detail as specific as a headlight count became the thing people fixated on in the comments: viewers watched three legitimate visions get argued for on camera, then watched the room pick the riskiest one.

The 1970 ‘Cuda: Chrysler’s High-Water Mark for the E-Body

To understand why a design choice on one build video matters this much to muscle car fans, you have to understand what the 1970 ‘Cuda actually was. The Barracuda name had existed since 1964, but 1970 marked a complete reinvention: Plymouth moved the car off its old compact A-body chassis and onto the brand-new E-body platform, shared with the Dodge Challenger, giving it a wider track, a longer hood, and room under that hood for engines the earlier Barracuda could never have swallowed. For exactly this one model year, Plymouth threw nearly its entire engine catalog at the ‘Cuda badge. Buyers could order the 275-horsepower 340 small-block, the 335-horsepower 383 big-block, the 375-horsepower 440 Magnum, the 390-horsepower 440 Six Pack (a triple two-barrel carburetor setup producing a staggering 480 lb-ft of torque at just 2,300 rpm), or the range-topping 425-horsepower 426 Hemi. No other model year offered that full spread under one nameplate, which is a big part of why 1970 specifically is the year Mopar collectors chase hardest.

The Hemi cars sit at the very top of that hierarchy, and the convertibles sit above even those. Chrysler built only 14 Hemi ‘Cuda convertibles for the 1970 model year — 21 total across 1970 and 1971 combined — out of roughly 780 Hemi ‘Cudas built altogether. That scarcity has turned surviving examples into some of the most valuable American cars ever sold at auction, with verified sales reaching well into the millions of dollars. The E-body Barracuda’s entire run was brief by design: it lasted only through 1974, its final year closing out at 11,734 Barracudas total, with just 4,989 of those wearing the ‘Cuda badge, before Chrysler discontinued the nameplate for good amid tightening emissions rules and a shrinking muscle car market. A restomod project built on this platform isn’t just modifying “an old muscle car” — it’s reworking one of the shortest-lived, most engineering-diverse nameplates Detroit ever produced.

The 1970 ‘Cuda also has a racing pedigree most casual fans overlook. That same year, Plymouth entered the SCCA Trans-Am series and brought in Dan Gurney’s All American Racers team to build and campaign a homologation special: the AAR ‘Cuda. To legally race it, Plymouth had to build at least 2,500 street versions, and the factory turned out 2,724 of them in a single five-week sprint between March and April 1970 — each running a 340-cubic-inch V8 with a triple-carburetor “Six Barrel” setup rated at 290 horsepower, tuned for road courses rather than straight-line drag runs. It’s a reminder that even in a lineup stacked with Hemis and 440s, the 1970 ‘Cuda’s most historically significant variant wasn’t the most powerful one; it was the one built to turn corners.

Why the Quad-Headlight Design Breaks New Ground

Restomod culture generally splits into two camps: builds that lean hard into factory nostalgia, and builds that treat the original sheet metal as a starting point for something the factory never dared build. Corky’s orange pitch and Rob’s B5 Blue pitch both lived in the first camp — each was a strong, defensible take on what a 1970 ‘Cuda “should” look like, drawing on the same factory color palette the E-body actually shipped with. Cat’s design lived entirely in the second camp, and that’s precisely why it won. A quad-headlight front clip on a ‘Cuda isn’t a period-correct option pulled from a factory brochure; it’s a modern styling cue grafted onto a 56-year-old body, and the team’s own reaction on camera, along with the flood of comments calling it out by name, suggests it reads as aggressive and cohesive rather than like a bolt-on gimmick.

That’s the tightrope every high-end restomod has to walk: change enough to justify the build, without losing what made the donor car worth building in the first place. It’s the same tension that separates a car like the factory AAR ‘Cuda — different enough to win races, but still unmistakably a 1970 ‘Cuda — from a build that goes too far and loses the plot entirely. With the design locked in and fabrication now underway, Project CudaCat is headed toward a SEMA target the team has been open about aiming for, backed by partners supplying paint, masking, coatings, and a custom Rockford Fosgate audio system for the finished car.

SEMA — the Specialty Equipment Market Association’s annual trade show in Las Vegas — has become the de facto proving ground for exactly this kind of build. It is where custom shops unveil the cars meant to define what a restomod can look like for the following year, and a 1970 ‘Cuda carries more weight on that stage than almost any other E-body could. Between the model’s five-engine lineup, its 14-unit Hemi convertible rarity, and its one-year-only AAR homologation story, there is no shortage of factory history for a modern build to either honor or deliberately break from. Cat’s quad-headlight pitch chose to break from it, and the project’s own tagging — alongside labels like #RestoMod and #CustomCarBuild, the team has flagged it #HellcatSwap — signals the finished car is headed toward modern Mopar power rather than a numbers-matching Hemi rebuild. That places Project CudaCat in the same conversation as the small handful of high-profile shops that have spent the last decade building supercharged, Hellcat- and Demon-powered Mopar restomods — mostly Challengers and Chargers so far — for collectors who want vintage looks with 21st-century power underneath. A ‘Cuda built to that same standard would be a rarer sight than the swap itself.

Whatever rolls under Las Vegas show lights when the build is finished will look nothing like the bare, chemically-stripped shell Rob describes hauling out of North Carolina. It also will not look like Corky’s orange pitch or Rob’s B5 Blue pitch — the two directions that, by the team’s own account, lost the room the moment Cat pulled the cover off her design. Based on the reaction to Episode 3 alone, that outcome is exactly the point: a 56-year-old nameplate with one of the deepest engine lineups in muscle car history, wearing a face it has never worn before, built for a stage where nostalgia alone rarely wins.

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