Yes. Yes, indeed.

[Dr.Jass]

Welcome to Sleeper City.

If you're into Q-ships, this one's pretty freakin' awesome. This may or may not be the car I looked at in 1998, but if it is it's extremely solid. Atlanta's a big town, though, and it's entirely possible there are two oddball-green two-seat radio/heater-delete '68 Valiants with strokers and 4-speeds running around. The color seemed a lot lighter on the one I saw, but it was a fleet green. Fade? I don't know... but one thing it shares in common is a price that's way too high. That guy was asking $19,000 for the one I saw. Clean? Extraordinarily. Fast? No doubt. Absolutely nothing to say negatively about it, except that it's a '68 two-seater Valiant 100, so absolute max value on it is probably about $15,000. Oh, and though the heater delete seems a neat thing to, well, lack, there are very few climates where you can actually get away with no defogger. Atlanta ain't one of 'em any more than here. He's completely insane on the price tag. For the price tag he's got on it, this car had better run sevens in the quarter and the NHRA inspector should be completely cool with it. Neither is the case.

Still.... look at that thing. It's like a innocent-looking little insect whose color tells you it's just plain bad news to mess with. :dance:

 

[69.5CUDA]

ok..its my turn to pick it apart since the price is just STUPID

hate back seat "plate" looks to have been cut by a monkey..while it "might" have been a factory "delete" car..you put a cuda dash in it that it didnt have...and worse you did a butcher job putting a guage in..where..you could have pulled the glass and ring off the tach and stuffed it in the hole with nothing more than a shim instead you tacked the tach on the dash pad..come on!!!...then theres the piss poor "delete" on the cuda dash...factory delete on those ment they were BLANK not a raised plate..so why take the time to make a piss poor plate when you coulda used some plastic and filled them in? hell it looks like you propperly deleted the barracuda off the glove box end wait i take that back..it looks like just a slab of cheep plastic..the color dont even match!!!! and who the fuck installed the cig lighter(those dashes were useualy marked for them and the hole was ALWAYS centered)..the hurst emblem out back ruins it..like straight up breaks the sleeper bit..on top of looking out of place..that battery uh?tray? just looks scary and a bad idea on top of that..so..to the engine bay...you put a big OK on the fender..you re-do all the decals and then punch a bunch of holes for race goodies?..the wiring shows CLEAR signs of being a hack job and badly re-skinned...if you moved the battery why in the fuck not move the starter relay to a less seen location..hell do what i did..move it to the trunk with the battery...race bits but factory hose clamps?..ugh

its nice enuf looking on the outside...but dude shoulda picked a direction...either make it look stone stock meaning stamped steel covers a factoy air cleaner of some kind..painted block and hide the race shit...or go full boogy and stop hiding it and make it not fail tech inspection....i dont think there is any track that will let you run a relocated battery without a rear kill switch...theres too much half a this 3/4 of that crap going on

 

[Dr.Jass]

It's a Rallye dash... that doesn't make it a Barracuda dash. But yes, I see what you're seeing, although the "paint mismatch" is clearly a shadow from the upper door frame. The heater delete looks legit but the radio delete definitely isn't, which also begs the question of what happened to the delete fender. Some cars had a factory plug for the antenna hole, but I know at least pre-'70, the hole simply wasn't stamped on the radio-delete A-bodies. :hmmm:

I'm pretty sure that "OK" is there to make people think this is an original-paint car when it's obvious that it's not. There's no way a fleet-car paint job would survive over 42 years in that condition. They're treated one step better than rentals. It never even occurred to me that this might be a factory paint job because it's so obviously not. That's why I wondered if it was the lighter-green one I saw almost 20 years ago... my thinking is that someone got that car and did a bunch of work to it. This car's undercarriage is far from original; the bottom of the spare-tire well should have the original paint color showing through toward the front of it. Unless the car was black, no Mopar had a black undercarriage, and even on the black ones there's primer showing through all over the place (inside of frame rails, driveshaft tunnel, tunnel side of floor ribs, etc.).

The underhood stuff is mostly immaterial. Most street races are spur-of-the-moment affairs, not "Street Outlaws" organized events where everyone comes clean about what they've got. However, I'd be in the same boat as you: factory air cleaner & valve covers, grind any identifying marks off the heads and intake, and paint everything one color. Make it look as stock as possible. It should also have extremely quiet exhaust, and that idiotic Hurst T-handle should be a plain black knob with a striaght-H 3-speed pattern. I'm not sure what your complaint is with the wiring, though. It's there, it's bundled, and while I don't like where it's located it doesn't look like a shorting hazard to me. There certainly isn't much of it. As far as the rear-mounted kill switch, that's an NHRA and IHRA requirement. I've never been to a strip that required it. Most strip requirements are pretty lax... if it doesn't look like it's about to fall apart, spit fluid all over the track, or burst into flames they'll let you run. Remember, I raced the Black Bitch at Atlanta which is an NHRA track, but it wasn't during an NHRA event. That car looked like it was about to do all three of those things simultaneously and they let me run it (and probably cringing on those 6,800RPM upshifts, too).

This guy's obviously fishing, because this isn't even a "you couldn't build it for that" situation. It's a $5,000 engine in a $4,000 car with a $3,000 paint job, but its sum value is less than those parts added. Like I said max value on it is maybe $15K assuming it runs way faster than it possibly can. The lack of a data tag means you're taking everything on the seller's word, since I'm betting there's no build sheet for this "rare" car either. The reality of the situation is that it's not an attractive color, it's got zero collector value being a Slant Six 3-speed car, and the engine doesn't even have good heads, so it's nowhere near fast enough to warrant even 1/3rd of the price.

But I love the exterior look of it overall. There are a lot of things I'd change or improve, but as a roller it'd be one hell of a starting point.

 

[69.5CUDA]

look again at that dash...i thought it was door glare too..but BOTH gut shots show it..its just a slab o plastic on the glove box..theres no raised ridge around it(look from the drivers side shot its very "sharp edged" it SHOULD be smooth curves..either way said dash wouldnt have come in a strip down valiant lol..but i can overlook the want of the cool dash..just not a badly done hack jobed one..more often than not someone grabs a fish dash cause a ralley one is too hard to find...same dash sure..but then glove box plate has to be cleaned up

the wiring while well bundled i see crimp connectors hanging out of it..so its deffinatly a hack job..just a well masked one


at 1/4 the price i could overlook alot of it...anything above that id be poking my nose in every flaw