This ’68 Dodge Charger Is The Ultimate Pro Street Reboot!

The man who shaped the 1968 Dodge Charger sculpted the design between official assignments, in clay, as something closer to a personal project than a sanctioned program. It became one of the most recognizable American cars ever built, and he left Detroit shortly afterward without ever styling another production vehicle. Decades later, builders are still reinterpreting his lines in Pro Street form, which is its own kind of credit.

For Dodge stylist Richard Sias, the 1968 Charger proved to be an amazing contribution to automotive history. A Michigan native who studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, Sias was a young man on a mission when he was given the directive to put body lines to the 1968 rendering of the car by his bosses at Chrysler’s design studio. Despite mis-pronouncements by some higher-level managers, his model prevailed as the one released in late 1967. Ironically, after this amazing project, he would leave Detroit soon after and never designed another OEM combination, eventually going to Boeing for decades where he put his talent on things like airplane equipment.

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Design credit in Detroit was rarely handed out fairly, and Richard Sias found that out the direct way. The man who reshaped the entire silhouette of the Dodge Charger did it almost sideways, sculpting his idea into a scale clay model between official trim assignments rather than as an approved program with a budget attached to it. The shape he arrived at went on to become one of the most recognizable American cars ever built, a permanent fixture on magazine covers, and decades later the kind of body that builders still argue over the right way to reinterpret. Sias himself was gone from the automobile business within a few years of it reaching showrooms, and he never designed another production car for anyone.

Credit in Detroit Was Never Distributed Fairly

Detroit design studios in the 1960s operated on a system where the person who moved the clay and the person whose name reached the public were frequently not the same person. Styling was a collaborative process by necessity, with dozens of hands touching a body between the first sketch and the production tooling, and the corporate preference was to credit the studio rather than the individual. That arrangement had a defensible logic and a predictable consequence: designers who produced something genuinely significant often watched it enter the world attached to a department name. Some of them made peace with it and built long careers inside the system. Others concluded fairly quickly that the arrangement was never going to change and went looking for work in industries that kept better records of who did what.

A Concept Sculpted Between Official Assignments

Sias was a Michigan native who studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, graduating in 1963 and landing in Detroit almost immediately. He worked first for General Motors before joining Chrysler, and by the mid-1960s he was contributing to Dodge Dart styling, which in the internal hierarchy of a design studio is honest work but not the assignment anyone dreams about. Encouraged by studio manager Charles Mitchell, he began sculpting an advanced concept in clay on his own initiative, working at one-tenth scale on a theme he described as double-diamond, a shape that read as a coke-bottle profile from the side. It was not a Charger proposal. It became one because the shape was good enough that management could not ignore it.

What the Double-Diamond Shape Actually Did

What the double-diamond theme did was solve the specific problem the first-generation Charger had never solved. The 1966 and 1967 fastback looked like a Coronet with an unusual roof, because underneath it largely was one, and the long unbroken roofline read as awkward rather than fast. Sias pushed the volume out over the wheels front and rear and pinched it at the middle, which gave the body visual tension the earlier car completely lacked. The tunneled backlight, with rear roof pillars flying back to the deck lid and the rear window recessed between them, replaced the fastback and gave the car a distinct rear three-quarter view. The hidden headlights, which had looked merely strange on the first car, suddenly read as deliberate.

96,100 Cars and a Complete Reversal of Fortune

The commercial reversal was immediate and enormous. Dodge had planned production of roughly 35,000 units for 1968, a projection based on how the previous two model years had actually gone. Demand ran past that forecast so far that the division built 96,100 cars that model year, nearly triple the plan, and the Charger went from a nameplate Chrysler could have justified killing to one of the division’s defining products in the space of a single redesign. The R/T version paired the 440 Magnum, rated at 375 horsepower, with heavy-duty suspension and brakes, and the 426 Hemi remained on the order sheet for a small number of buyers who wanted the most extreme version available.

The Shape That Won Showrooms and Lost Superspeedways

The irony sitting inside that success is that the shape selling so well was actively working against Dodge on the racetrack. The recessed grille acted as a low-pressure pocket at superspeedway speeds and the tunneled backlight generated lift over the rear of the car, which made the Charger unstable exactly where NASCAR races were won. Chrysler’s response ran in two escalating stages, first the flush-grille and flush-window Charger 500 built in roughly 392 street copies for homologation, then the Charger Daytona with its extended nose cone and towering rear wing, 503 of which were built. The most beautiful body Chrysler produced in the 1960s had to be substantially disfigured to be competitive.

Why Sias Left for an Industry With No Showrooms

Sias did not stay to watch any of it play out. After the Charger project he left Detroit and went to Boeing, where he spent decades applying his design work to aircraft equipment rather than automobiles, and he never styled another original equipment vehicle. That career turn is easy to read as a loss, though it may have been a straightforward assessment of how design credit worked in the industry at the time. Higher-level managers had ruled against his model during development and his version prevailed anyway, but prevailing once is not the same as being handed the influence that should have followed.

The Pro Street Reinterpretation and What It Keeps

The Pro Street reinterpretation of the 1968 body, of the sort pictured with this article, is a useful test of how strong the original design was. Pro Street as a style tubs the rear wheel wells to fit enormous rear tires, raises the rear of the car, narrows the front rolling stock, and frequently exposes a supercharger through the hood. Applied to a weak shape it looks like a caricature. Applied to the 1968 Charger it works, because the double-diamond volumes were already exaggerated over the wheels, and pushing the rear track wider only amplifies a proportion Sias had built in from the beginning. The shape absorbs the modification instead of fighting it.

A Design That Outlasted Everyone Who Approved It

That durability is the real measure of what he accomplished. A great many cars from the late 1960s look correct only in the exact configuration the factory shipped, and any deviation reads as damage. The 1968 Charger has been restored to concours standard, tubbed for the strip, restomodded with modern drivetrains, chopped, slammed, and turned into a television character, and it survives all of it recognizably. Sias built a shape robust enough to carry other people’s ideas for more than fifty years, which is a strange and considerable legacy for something that started as clay pushed around between assignments nobody was watching.

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