Maybe the saddest M-Code Cuda you will ever come across
i can tell you ALL about that zebra striped M car - i missed buying it by an hour.
this car was sitting on concrete blocks in a driveway about 20 miles south of Pittsburgh, PA in a "rural" section of a small town. about 8 years ago i learned of this car and started to try and buy it. i met some "local" mopar guys down in the car's area that knew of this car and they set up a meeting with the owner and myself. the guy wanted $5000 for the car. i went to his house once and he wasn't home. i left a note with my name and phone number and about a week later, he called me - on a Friday i believe. we agreed to meet the next day, Saturday, so i went to the bank and got the $5k cash and then at the agreed time, showed up at his house that Saturday morning.
the guy was an "interesting" person. he had purchased this 69 Cuda back in the late 1970's and had driven it around town and drag raced it basically in stock condition. then around the mid 1980's, due to a romance, or a family argument - or "something" - this guy decided to move to San Francisco. but he had been working on the car and it was on blocks in his parent's driveway AND THAT'S HOW HE LEFT IT - for ALMOST TWENTY YEARS!! he came back to the Pittsburgh area in the early 2000's and the car was still sitting in the driveway. by this time, the car had "rusted in place. the uni-body structure of the car had rusted and "sagged" on the blocks, the motor and trans were all torn apart lying on the floor in rust in his old garage and the interior was just about shot from the Pennsylvania winters and summers. if you have been a Graveyard Carz fan since that show started then you know about that orange 1970 Hemi Cuda that had been wrecked and was almost folded up in a ball and that was the car Mark Worman started the show with - saying he was going to "save" that car. well, the zebra striped m car was in worse condition due to rust and neglect than Worman's orange Hemi cuda. Worman at least had "something" to work with with the orange cuda. the candy striped m cuda was more like what's left of the H.M.S. Titanic now than it still being "a car."
so i show up at the cuda guy's house with a pocket full of cash, he comes to the door and says: "i'm sorry, i just sold the car." being both shocked and pissed off, i said: "you just sold the car, i thought you were going to wait till i got here?" then the guy said that "some guy from up-state New York" showed up with a box trailer and i sold it to him for $2000." well, i've got to say, i've missed some deals on cars in the past but never quit like this one.
as it turned out, the guy from New York took that car home with apparently an idea of saving it but decided it was too far gone. AND THEN, a fellow FABO member ended up buying the car off of the New York guy. i won't disclose who the FABO guy was, i'll let him disclose that information if he wants to. i will say that i talked to our fellow FABO member a few times about buying some parts from this car after i acquired the m car i have. the present FABO owner has all the final and sad details about this car as, i believe, he still owns it.
i know most of the m-code Cudas and Darts led a hard life being drag cars from their birth. many of them were wrecked because they would go very fast in a straight line but they wouldn't go around curves very well NOR could they stop with the old four wheel "non-power" drum brakes. these cars were designed from the factory to be used in "sanctioned drag racing" and little else. yes, the cut-up drag car i've posted that was "converted" from a notchback to a fastback is a pathetic end to a wonderful car. but can you imagine putting an original m-code 440 fastback cuda on four concrete blocks in a driveway in a small rural Pennsylvania town and then just leaving it - for twenty years? loving these old mopars as i do, the story of the "candy-striped M-Code Cuda" is a sad one indeed as far as i'm concerned.
