In the early 1990’s, the Mopar hobby was taking off in a big way. The muscle car popularity explosion of the late 1980”s had turned a lot of people on to Road Runners, Challengers, and the like. To feed information to this mass of enthusiasts, no less than six Mopar magazines were on the newsstands at that time. One of the “big four” magazines was the recently deceased High Performance Mopar; and that’s where our story sort of begins.
Longtime Mopar devotee Jeff Bauer was editor of HPM in its early days, and it was Jeff who enlisted Dave Ferro of Totally Auto fame as tech editor for the mag. During a brainstorming session, Jeff told Dave he wanted the magazine to build a small block E-body for an on-going restoration project car. The plan was to publish photos and details of the restoration, step-by-step, in order to help the little guys out there working on their own restorations. That sounded like a good idea to both, and the search began for a suitable starting point.
Several months of looking at potential cars went by, but they were having no luck finding the right car. Then, one day in 1992, Jeff spied a horrible blue ‘71 Challenger convertible sitting in the corner of Dave’s shop, “What’s that?”, Jeff asked innocently enough. To which Dave informed him the derelict ‘71 had been his teenage cruiser and he intended to restore it some day. After telling Jeff the car was an original 340. 4-speed. Plum Crazy car, Jeff was adamant - this was their car! The machine they had been looking for had been sitting in Dave’s shop all along. This was the starting point for what became HPM magazine’s “Plum Crazy Project” (better known as PCP).
Dave bought the convertible on February 13, 1985 (A Friday the 13th), from the original owner in northern New Jersey. Interestingly, had it not been for the insistence of a friend, Dave would have never gone to look at the car, as the ad in the trade paper simply described the car as a “Challenger convertible” and offered few details.
The two inspected the car sitting in the owner’s driveway with a considerable amount of snow piled on it (they drove nearly a hundred miles in near blizzard conditions). Dave’s attention was immediately pulled to the rear valance with the exhaust cutouts, and on looking in the window, he spotted a Pistol Grip shifter - what was this? At that time, the car was wearing a respectable blue paint job, so when they popped the hood and saw a 340 sitting between Plum Crazy inner fenders, Dave’s jaw hit the ground. Less than a week before, he’d told Jimmy and a group of his friends that his dream car would be a 340 powered four speed Plum Crazy “71 Challenger convertible! And here it was; his literal dream car!
Via some quick financing wizardry, Dave scrapped together the $1,300 it took to buy the car, then drove it home with wife Diane; top down, in the middle of a blowing snow storm! Oh yes, and lest we forget to mention, the ragtop only had 23,000 original miles.
For the next several years, Dave did his utmost to kill the Challenger. The boy had a heavy foot! And, Dave drove it morning, noon, and night, rain or shine, snow or sleet. This was not a pampered car! In street races, the convertible was beating cars that ran in the low 13s, and still got him back and forth to work. An additional 33,000 miles were rolled up on the odometer, and the Pennsy winters took their toll.
The convertible already had some rust problems when Dave bought it in “85, but things deteriorated rapidly. The rear shock absorber top mounting bracket rusted and fell off, the floors rotted away, and the rear sub-frames started looking like Swiss cheese. When a structural problem arose, Dave merely welded a piece of angle iron onto the frame and kept on driving! The quarter panels rusted heavily, and one snowy afternoon he leisurely kicked the lower quarter to knock the accumulated snow out of a large hole. To his surprise, most of the lower quarter panel fell off - not good! Finally, after an outing to a local park, the shift linkage fell out from under the car thanks to the retaining clips breaking off. Dave took off his shoe laces and used them to tie the shift linkage back together. With this done, he got the convertible back home, but that ended the car’s days on the road.