Photos courtesy Hollywood Wheels.
It was untested, prone to engine failure, and largely unpredictable in turns, but at least its body held together better than its acid-dipped sister car. The #76 1970 Dodge Challenger also finished two of its four Trans-Am races in the points, helping Dodge nudge past rival Plymouth for fourth place in the season standings. While that ultimately mattered little at the time, it may help the Challenger when it comes up for auction next year.
When Chrysler committed to the 1970 season of the SCCA’s Trans-Am series – and in the process committed to the now-popular AAR ‘Cuda and Challenger T/A homologation specials – racing manager Pete Hutchinson set up two teams to handle each of the company’s recently introduced E-body pony cars: Dan Gurney’s All-American Racers for the Plymouth ‘Cuda and Ray Caldwell’s Autodynamics (in partnership with Sam Posey) for the Dodge Challenger. Both teams benefited from AAR’s personnel, including Bob Tarozzi and Phil Remington, when it came to basic chassis engineering and roll cage construction, but more or less operated separately on everything else. Caldwell insisted on a Can-Am-style rear suspension setup applied to the Challenger’s live axle and had Keith Black build the 305-cu.in. V-8s (based on special Trans-Am four-bolt-main blocks provided by Chrysler) while Gurney went with a more conventional rear suspension and John Miller-developed V-8s also based on the Trans-Am blocks.
Perhaps the biggest difference between the two, however (besides the Sublime paint used on the Dodges versus the more restrained dark blue on the Plymouths), came down to the cars’ acid-dipped bodies. While standard practice among the leading Trans-Am racers at the time, the Autodynamics team left their first Challenger body in the bath a little too long, reducing its body integrity to the point where an inspection official, as legend has it, either dented or pushed entirely through the car’s roof just before the first race of the season, forcing the team to scramble to replace the roof with one cut from a Challenger at a local Dodge dealership. As Posey related multiple times since then, the weakened body barely lasted through an entire race without cracking apart and forcing the team to reweld it between races.
Despite the floating rear suspension and the flexible body, Posey managed to push the primary #77 Challenger to sixth-, third-, and fifth-place finishes in the first four races of the season. In the fifth, at Bridgehampton, however, Posey DNF’d (though the official reason for the DNF was listed as “throttle,” Posey and Gurney have both said that Chrysler instructed them to never admit to blowing an engine in a race), forcing him to alternate between #77 and his backup car, #76, for the rest of the season.
How much time, if any, #76 saw in the acid bath seems to be debatable. In The Cars of Trans-Am Racing , Tarozzi said neither Challenger body got the proper neutralization to stop the acid etching process, but Posey said that #76 was undipped. In either case, it still suffered from the same undeveloped rear-suspension design as #77 and the spotty reliability of the Keith Black V-8s. In its first outing at Donnybrooke, it DNF’d, as it did in its last outing of the season at Riverside with Tony Adamowicz at the wheel. Yet at Mont-Tremblant Posey drove it to a fourth-place finish, and at Kent he drove it to third, accounting for seven of the Dodge team’s 18 points. (Gurney and the Plymouth team, which had been competing with Autodynamics for Chrysler’s favor, accumulated 15 points that season.)
Chrysler, like Ford and GM, dropped its official Trans-Am support by the end of the season, and the #76 Challenger reportedly became a USAC racer afterward, racing through the late 1970s. Then in the early 1980s, while restoring one of the two AAR-built Trans-Am ‘Cudas, Kentucky collector Ed Skanes came across #76 and eventually restored it as well.
As described when it came up for sale in Hemmings Motor News two years ago, the #76 Challenger nowadays has one of its original Keith Black V-8s, along with its original four-speed transmission, rear axle, suspension, and Minilite wheels. It had attended the Amelia Island Concours d’Elegance, the Ault Park Concours d’Elegance, and the Keeneland Concours d’Elegance, along with SEMA and the 2012 Autodynamics Racing Reunion at Lime Rock Park.
The asking price when it came up for sale in 2012 was $500,000. Hollywood Wheels, which will run the #76 Challenger across its block at its Amelia Island, has not released a pre-auction estimate.
The Hollywood Wheels Amelia Island Select auction will take place March 13-15. For more information, visit HollywoodWheels.com.
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