A fun Sunday visit with the Ghost........

[fortyshooter]

Any of you that follow the Mecum auctions and remember last May when the Black Ghost 1970 Hemi Challenger sold for $975,000 well the new owner
shipped up to a shop near me for some freshen up work but not a restoration. Have known the guy who runs the place for over 30 yrs. so we stopped by yesterday afternoon. Trying to get my brother to send his 70 Hemicuda there and get it put together again before it is too late...we getting old fast!
Anyway invited my son and brother to come along for an interesting day!

[Vaquero]

Don't follow the auctions.
What's so special about the old Dodge??

RP

[Hatchdog]

Forty will chime in but I recall it was owned by a cop who would bring it our once in a while and street race it. He would blow the doors off everybody and then disappear again. But I could have my wires crossed (again )

[fortyshooter]

Yes you are correct on the story Hatch. The guy lived in Detroit area and when he came back from Viet Nam he wanted a fast Dodge so he ordered a triple black 1970 Challenger SE with the 426 Hemi 4 speed and Super Trac-Pack. He was a traffic cop with the local police force and street racing around there and most everywhere was hot. According to the story he added a hotter camshaft, headers and replaced the factory 4.10 gear with 4.30 and would go out street racing but just vanish into the night afterwards so as not to be caught racing....the Black Ghost. Now it wasn't the fastest car in the area by no means but enough for most of the typical muscle cars. The fastest I know of in that area was the Silver Bullet 1967 Hemi GTX of Jimmy Addison that was actually a backdoor test mule for 426 Hemi testing for the Chrysler Performance engineers. It ran out of Addison's Sunoco service station and was well written up in period car magazines like Car Craft. It could run 10's in muffled trim on the track.
Anyway the Black Ghost owner put his Challenger away in the garage for decades and told his son about his runs with the Hemi and passed away several years ago. The family decided to auction the car off and then the story got picked up by the automotive press. It was added to the Smithsonian Historical Society and Dodge even ran a short run of the last Hemi Challengers to be built as a Black Ghost option.
Several other Hemi cars were in my friends shop for some restoration work too which we looked at and also some discussions about getting my brother's 1970 Hemicuda there to get it back in running shape. This guy is the BEST of the Chrysler Hemi and 440 car restoration work in the country.

[dave77]

Nice car but just short of a million dollars seems incredible. But then I saw last night that the Dodgers gave a guy a $700,000,000 ten year contract (had to rewind the DVR a bit to make sure I heard that right). He apparently won't get a lot of it for 10 to 20 years but still, over a half a billion dollars for playing baseball seems crazy, of course I'm not a baseball fan.

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