The 3,000-LB Factory Hemi Barracuda That Ran 10s Before Buyers Signed A Disclaimer
In 1968, anyone ordering one particular Hemi-powered Chrysler compact had to sign a disclaimer first. The form confirmed the car had no warranty and didn’t meet federal safety standards, and a factory sticker on the left A-post said it wasn’t built for public roads.
Chrysler’s own dealer memo put its weight at roughly 3,000 pounds, and in racers’ hands it ran the quarter-mile in the 10s. Each car wore a factory VIN and came off a dealer order form, yet an outside contractor finished every one, which is why the paperwork tells the real story.
Chrysler Told The NHRA Its New Drag Car Was Well Within The Rules
Chrysler’s 1967 NHRA Super Stock season was a disappointment, and the company wanted its 1968 drag cars to beat GM and Ford outright. The plan was to turn a few dozen production cars into dedicated drag machines.
Neither of Chrysler’s compact A-body models listed the 426 Hemi as a regular option, so fitting the big race engine meant special engineering from day one.
On December 7, 1967, Chrysler Race Group’s Dick Maxwell wrote to the NHRA’s W.E. “Farmer” Dismuke, previewing proposed ’68 SS/B racecars based on the two compact A-bodies. He closed with “To the best of our knowledge, we are well within the current rules structure,” and the NHRA approved the plan.
Tom Hoover, Dick Maxwell, and Bob Cahill came up with the idea, and young engineer Bob Tarozzi ran development and testing. His first job was hitting a target weight, and he also designed Super Stock rear leaf springs that kept launches stable without ladder bars.
Chrysler was reluctant to build something this extreme on its own assembly line, so final assembly went to Hurst’s shop in Madison Heights, Michigan. That arrangement let Chrysler sell the car through its dealers while an outside shop handled the hard part.
This Hemi Barracuda Came With A Disclaimer Instead Of A Warranty
The 1968 Plymouth Barracuda BO29 Super Stock went public in a letter dated February 20, 1968, from Chrysler-Plymouth general sales manager R.D. McLaughlin to every Plymouth dealer. It offered a 426 Hemi-powered Barracuda fastback for “supervised acceleration trials,” said it would weigh roughly 3,000 pounds, and promised it met the specs of the major drag racing sanctioning bodies. Production was limited, with cars due in March.
Dealers ordered one by writing body code BO29 on a standard Barracuda order form and adding transmission code 393 for the four-speed or 395 for the automatic. The letter said no other specifications were needed, and it banned optional equipment of any kind. Between 50 and 70 cars were built this way, depending on the source.
That body code also became the first four characters of the car’s VIN, which on surviving examples starts with BO29M8B. Dodge’s own history of the sister LO23 Dart explains that the “O” is a letter marking a Super Stock model, not a zero.
Suggested retail was $5,214, a little more than the $5,146 Dodge asked for the LO23 Dart. That money bought no warranty at all, and every order had to include a disclaimer signed by the customer.
The letter even warned dealers that the engine needed a high idle to stay lubricated and that the intake caused surging and misfiring in cold weather. Buyers were also told to expect heavy oil consumption, poor fuel economy, loud engine noise from loose clearances, and frequent spark plug and point changes.
The A-post warning sticker wasn’t a legal ban, though, and Dodge notes it wasn’t hard to get a DMV to register one of the sister Darts. It even points to at least one genuine example that was licensed for the road.
Hamtramck Built The Body, Then Hurst Hammered It Into A Racecar
Every BO29 body came from Chrysler’s Hamtramck plant, while the race engines were prepared separately at Chrysler’s Marysville Marine and Industrial plant. Both went to Hurst’s Madison Heights facility, which is where the car and engine finally met. The Barracuda shells were built alongside the Hemi Darts, with the seam sealer, sound deadening, and insulation left out.
The sister Darts went down the Hamtramck line as running 383 cars so workers didn’t have to push them, and the Barracudas also started life as 383 Formula S cars. Those 383s were only temporary, since each car’s real engine was waiting at Hurst.
The package was proven on a single test car nicknamed the Mule. It began as a Formula S 340 from Chrysler’s Road Test Garage before the Special Vehicle Department fitted a Hemi, prototype blue fiberglass fenders, and six-cylinder torsion bars for maximum weight transfer. Tarozzi drove its first quarter-mile test at Irwindale on February 10, 1968, just 10 days before the dealer letter went out.
Fitting the Hemi meant modifying the right shock tower, relocating the master cylinder, and moving the battery to the trunk. Hurst workers also hammered the passenger-side inner fender until there was room to remove the valve cover, so no two cars came out exactly alike.
The front fenders and scooped hood were fiberglass, while the doors and front bumper were lightweight steel. Chrysler also deleted the heater, outside mirrors, right-side seat belt, and even the body-color paint, so cars arrived in gray primer with black gelcoat on the fiberglass.
The side windows were .080-inch Corning Chemcor glass, raised and lowered with seatbelt straps instead of cranks. The rear seat was gone, and the front buckets were Bostrom-built A-100 van seats bolted to aluminum brackets.
The Race Hemi Turned A 3,000-Lb Barracuda Into A 10-Second Car
The engine was the 426 cubic-inch (7.0-liter) Race Hemi, with 12.5:1 compression, cast iron heads, and twin Holley four-barrel carburetors on an aluminum cross-ram intake. It had a 4.250-inch bore and 3.750-inch stroke, mechanical valve gear, transistor ignition, and Hooker competition headers, and handpicked technicians built each one off the regular line. Chrysler rated it at 425 hp and 490 lb-ft, but real output was estimated at roughly 170 hp more.
Four-speed cars got a heavy-duty 10.5-inch clutch, a steel clutch housing, a Hurst shifter, and a Dana 9-3/4 rear axle with 4.88 gears. Automatic cars used a manual-shift TorqueFlite with a high-stall converter and a Chrysler 8-3/4 axle with 4.86 gears, and both versions came with a Sure-Grip differential.
The cars left Hurst on street tires with a shallow oil pan, so they weren’t 10-second cars straight off the trailer. Racers added slicks, a deeper pan, and their own cam and valvetrain work, and that was enough to push them into the 10s.
When the first cars hit NHRA’s SS/B class and its automatic counterpart, SS/BA, the records stood at 11.05 seconds at 127.29 mph and 11.25 seconds at 125.04 mph. Ronnie Sox is credited with a 10.22-second pass at 134.32 mph, and Dodge dates the NHRA’s move of these cars into the faster SS/A and SS/AA classes to 1970.
Sox & Martin took delivery of their car in early 1968 and had it ready for Chrysler-Plymouth’s display at the New York Auto Show. The team went on to rack up class wins across the country, including a Super Stock victory at the NHRA U.S. Nationals during its 1968–69 run.
The Top Sale So Far Is Nearly 50 Times Its $5,214 Sticker Price
Nobody knows how many of the original cars survive, since most spent years being thrashed at the drag strip and some were wrecked there.
The highest auction result so far came in January 2023, when a Sox & Martin-liveried car sold for $258,500 at Mecum’s Kissimmee sale. The same car had stalled at a $170,000 high bid at Mecum Indy the year before.
Chrysler’s engineers sold the Mule to racer Arlen Vanke for $1 to keep it from being scrapped. In May 2025, it drew a $125,000 high bid at Mecum Indy without meeting its reserve, then appeared on Facebook Marketplace that summer for $2,000,000.
George Wejbe’s Los Angeles-raced automatic resurfaced in December 2025 with its original engine and transmission. In 2026, the Gary’s Garage YouTube channel announced it had bought Bob Reed’s SS/AH 245 car, which is running again.
The breed still races in NHRA’s SS/AH class, which is reserved for 1968 A-body Hemi cars. Today’s versions run low-to-mid 8-second passes at over 160 mph.
Chrysler sold these cars for about $5,200 with no warranty and a signed disclaimer, and the top auction result since is nearly 50 times that.
Sources: Dodge, Red Vette Ranch, Sox & Martin, Mecum
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