This is a story about building a 5-second Mopar. It all started when then HOT ROD Editorial Director David Freiburger shared a link from Craigslist featuring a back-halved ’71 Dodge Demon. The car was in primer (red flag number one), but had some very professional-looking chassis and tin work inside. The slant six was still in place along with the stock firewall, dash, and everything forward of that point. We were thinking big-block swap and then calling it a day.
At the same time, we were producing a magazine call Elapsed Times, a throwback retro drag racing annual that was not only fun to read, but also fun to create. It was largely centered around the glory days of 1965-1980, when drag racing was evolving from a hobby to a professional sport. Staring at thousands of photos daily gave us the idea of painting the Demon with panels, freak dots, and lace like the Funny Cars that had our eye. We also really wanted the flat hood, door-slammer look — no scoops or cowls. Drinking the Kool-Aid made the car a lot more complicated. You can see for yourself if the result earns all the style points and street cred we think it does.
The car is better looking in person, if you believe that. Getting the car to this point took all of eight years.Never buy a car in primer. We know this, but we still couldn’t resist this deal. We got the car in trade of a LA 360 small-block stroker.The car had a Chris Alston 2×3 back-half already installed. To quote Chris, “There are thousands of these cars around with our back-half. For them, we also make a 2×3 front clip.” So that’s what we did.We hoped that under the primer was a clean body. It was mostly straight, but there was rust in the lowers that needed to be cut out. The car would spend most of that year at Elite Restorations in Paramount, California, where they cut out the bad and added new sheetmetal.Finally, paint. Danny and Praveen at Elite prepped the car and added a basecoat of ’69 Plymouth B5 Blue Fire from Axalta Coating Systems.The Harpoon has only painted two cars that we know of. The rest of his work is in the chopper world. After the base was sanded flat, he laid each stripe by hand.The candies, panels, freak dots, and stripe work took two weeks of 8-10 hour days. If you are doing the math, this is two years into the build, and the car doesn’t even run.The trick, we learned, to a mile-deep paintjob is the prep work and the number of coats of clearcoat on top. We lost track of that number but the resulting finish was like a new bowling ball. Just about as durable as well.While the Demon was in paint, we constructed a 392-inch Hemi using a K1 rotator and a ’06 Hemi block and heads from a Ram truck. At the time, no one had cracked the new Hemi code so we used a stand-alone Holley Dominator and cable-driven throttle body.The next step was to add a transmission, and only a 727 would do. Fortunately, Performance Automatic had a system in place that included a transbrake and enough juice to handle the 700 to 800 hp we planned to make at the wheel.Looking to drive this on the street, we soon found out that Be Cool can custom build just about anything. There are no nickel-and-dime items on a car like this — every system was $1,500 or more.You can see the level of fabrication required to build even a mild steel door car that is light and goes straight. After the car was clearcoated, it was disassembled (again) and the cage was painted with KBS Coatings brush-on paint.The difference between the last photo and this one is six months. By now we had assembled the car three times for test-fitting various parts. Finally, after four years, the car was running.On the first trip to the track, the car hooked hard and ran a string of low 9s. Thinking that raising the launch RPM would get us that last tenth rewarded us with a hard wheelstand that tweaked the narrowed iron 8 ¾ housing, moving the axle and chipping the ring and pinion.In the previous photo you can see what a hard launch will do to a four-link car that is making great power but doesn’t have an antiroll bar in the rear. The Fab 9 from Alston has a higher 3:55:1 gear, a Strange centersection, and a billet yolk. It’s not going to break again.Of course, with a change of the axle flanges, we had to upgrade the brakes to fit. These are Wilwood dynamic discs for drag racing. With this much braking power, it almost doesn’t need a parachute, but the NHRA says otherwise.On this run, none other than the great Kenny Duttweiler noted that the converter was too loose after seeing and hearing the car from a distance. We were very close to the 150-mph range so later we switched to the eighth-mile to avoid the parachute rule.Duttweiler was correct of course. Joe Rivera from Pro Torque cooked us up something from his power-adder collection and, wow, did we find some speed.Eight years later, the car can 60-foot in the 1.20s, run the eighth-mile in 5.58 seconds, and traps at 126 mph (that’s about 8.85 in the quarter depending on what calculator you use). Of course we skipped the wiring, interior, fuel system, wheels and tires, testing days, and a lot of other stuff in this story. Could we have built it faster? Time is money. Could we have built it cooler? Judge for yourself.
