Wow! 27 Hemi ‘Cuda & Challenger Convertibles In One Place!

Chrysler built so few Hemi powered E-body convertibles that commonly cited production figures put the entire two-year total at roughly two dozen cars worldwide. Bob Ashton spent nearly a full year on the phone with Mopar collectors trying to get 27 of them into one room at the Muscle Car And Corvette Nationals in Rosemont, Illinois. Read on for why that gathering may never be repeated, and what makes these particular cars so nearly impossible to assemble.

Imagine a car so rare that you could gather every surviving example on earth into a single convention hall and still have room to walk between them comfortably. Now imagine convincing the people who own those cars, most of whom have spent decades and seven-figure sums acquiring them, to load them onto trailers and send them to Illinois in November. That is roughly the scale of what one show promoter set out to do, and he gave himself eleven months and twenty-eight days to make the calls. What he assembled has a fair claim to being the single most valuable collection of Chrysler products ever parked in one room, and the reason it worked has less to do with money than with who was asking.

Who Bob Ashton Is and Why Collectors Answer His Calls

The promoter is Bob Ashton, co-owner and principal manager of the Muscle Car And Corvette Nationals, held at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Illinois. Ashton is a Michigan native whose father was a Chrysler executive, and he came to the show business from a background in promotion rather than from the collector world. That combination matters. He understands rarity and provenance the way a collector does, but he also understands that an exhibit needs a headline, and he spent the entire off-season working contacts among Mopar collectors to build one: the largest gathering of Hemi powered E-body convertibles in history.

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The Off-Season Nobody Else Would Have Spent That Way

An off-season for a show promoter is normally spent on contracts, floor plans, sponsorship and vendor bookings. Building a headline exhibit around the rarest cars a manufacturer ever produced is optional work that nobody would fault him for skipping. The difficulty is not finding the cars, because in a community this small everyone broadly knows where the significant examples live. The difficulty is that each owner has to be approached individually, in the right order, with a credible sense of who else has already agreed. Collectors of this caliber are far more likely to say yes when they know their car will be standing beside its peers rather than alone under a spotlight, which means the first several conversations are the hardest and the last several are comparatively easy. Sequencing those calls correctly across the better part of a year is the actual skill on display here.

What an E-Body Actually Is

For anyone newer to Mopar shorthand, the E-body is the platform underneath the 1970 through 1974 Plymouth Barracuda and Dodge Challenger. It was Chrysler’s answer to the Mustang and Camaro, arriving late but arriving with the widest engine bay in the class, wide enough to swallow the 426 Hemi without the compromises that plagued Hemi installations in smaller cars. The convertible bodies were offered only at the front end of that run, which is the first constraint on how many Hemi drop-tops could ever have existed.

The Production Numbers That Make This Absurd

The second constraint is the option sheet. The Hemi was ferociously expensive, added insurance cost, demanded regular valve adjustment, and appealed to a buyer who generally wanted a hardtop for stiffness. Commonly cited production figures reflect exactly that: the 1970 Hemi Barracuda convertible is usually counted in the low teens including export cars, the 1971 figure sits at around a dozen, and the 1970 Hemi Challenger R/T convertible is typically counted in the single digits. Add them together and the entire worldwide production of Hemi E-body convertibles across all years lands in the mid thirties, with 14 Hemi Cuda convertibles for 1970, around a dozen for 1971, and nine Hemi Challenger R/T convertibles in 1970. Gathering 27 of them, allowing for how these figures get counted and disputed, means Ashton pulled in roughly three quarters of every one ever built.

Why the Convertibles Almost Never Sold New

What makes the story better is that these were not cars anybody wanted new. In 1970 and 1971 a Hemi convertible was an expensive, impractical, insurance-punishing choice at a moment when the market was already turning away from big engines. That is precisely why so few were ordered, and it is precisely why the survivors are worth what they are. The market that ignored them in period created the scarcity that defines them now. Documented examples have crossed the block in the seven-figure range, and a genuine 1971 Hemi Cuda convertible is routinely discussed as one of the most valuable American production cars in existence.

400,000 Square Feet in Rosemont, Illinois

The venue gives some sense of the scale involved. The Donald E. Stephens Convention Center offers roughly 400,000 square feet of floor, and MCACN fills it with restored and unrestored cars that would headline most other shows on their own. Walking in feels like stepping backward several decades, with survivors, barn finds and concours-level restorations arranged close enough to compare directly. That density is the show’s whole proposition, and it is why owners of significant cars agree to participate rather than keeping them in climate-controlled storage.

Insurance, Transport and the Logistics of Borrowing Legends

The logistics behind an exhibit like this are the part nobody photographs. Every car needs enclosed transport, agreed insurance valuations, security arrangements on the floor, and an owner willing to accept the small but real risk that comes with moving an irreplaceable object. Multiply that by 27 and coordinate the schedules of 27 separate owners, several of whom may not be on speaking terms with each other, and the eleven months of phone calls start to look like an underestimate rather than a boast.

Why This Gathering May Never Happen Again

Whether it happens again is genuinely uncertain. Values have continued to climb, ownership has consolidated into fewer hands and more institutions, and the appetite for shipping a seven-figure car across state lines does not increase as prices rise. Gatherings like this depend on one person with the credibility to ask and the patience to keep asking through an entire off-season. For anyone who walked that floor, the right response is not to compare notes on which car was best but to appreciate that all of them were in the same building at the same time, which had never happened before and may not happen again. Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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