What got you hooked on A-Bodies anyway?

These are some of the best posts that I’ve ever read on this forum. Thanks for sharing your stories, guys.


A-Bodies, even the prettiest Barracuda 340-S, etc are relatively humble cars in the world of classic muscle. It seems to me that fans of these cars almost always have reasons for loving these cars other than “it makes me look cool.” I have profound respect for that.


For me, ending up in an A-Body was inevitable. My dad has always been a Mopar fan (had a ’67 GTX since I was 3) and through osmosis, I knew even as a young kid that I needed to find a way to get a 60s/70s Mopar into my life ASAP, preferably as soon as I could get my license.


Somehow I got the message as a teenager in the 1990s that while a Challenger, ‘Cuda, Roadrunner, GTX, etc. would be out of reach for a long time to come (on my meager grocery bagger’s wage), it was conceivable that I could find a Dart or a Duster and still have a great looking, reliable, simple, hot rod to work on and drive to school. I must have been an extra smart kid because somehow, I liked Darts/Dusters pretty much as much as any of the higher dollar Mopar machines anyway! So I set out to find one as soon as I had some cash in the bank.

I almost bought a /6 ’71 Demon but changed my mind at the last minute because of my realization about the cost/difficulty of the body work that it needed…and as if it was mean to be, I found my rust-free (impossibly rare for Connecticut) V8 Dart Sport a couple months later, fell completely in love at first site, bought it for $700 and it has turned out to be exactly the right car for me at every age so far. I wouldn’t trade it for a 1970 AAR ‘Cuda 4spd with $100k strapped to the roof! :D