 Our own high stakes as treasured Mopars cross the block at $400,000-plus. |
And some of the cars were pretty impressive. Already that afternoon, a 1970 Six Pack convertible Road Runner had fetched $200,000 (which may be a record for a street-built wedge B-body), an incredible ‘70 Hemi’Cuda with ultra-low miles, 74 real clicks to be exact, had brought $500,000 (which may have been a good deal for this particular E-body), and my favorite, a 1969 Hemi GTX convertible with repro Kelsey-Hayes recall wheels, also hammered away at $200,000 (one of 16 built). We began watching on Saturday evening just as a Hummer that CNN had taken into the Iraq war zone and then given to Chip Foose for a makeover hit the ground running. With all proceeds going to the Fisher House project for injured veterans, the bidding on that ended at a cool million bucks.
 Bob Johnson’s radical ‘Cuda on the big screen for the nation. |
The first Mopar up was a one-of-one 1970 Sub Lime Hemi Challenger with all the right stuff. I got carried away and wrote 435K; the final 200K bid was perhaps closer to reality, but the seller may not have been real happy. The next Chrysler was Bob Johnson’s radical 1971 Hemi ’Cuda custom, and the estimates in the room ranged from 90K to 1.1M. It finished at 532K, and a 525K guess was the victor, but it wasn’t mine. But then I won the ex-Mickey Thompson Kurtis roadster with a 710K guess on a 775K hammer-down, we all missed a Hemi Superbird that took 270K to bring home due to TV ads, and I got the next Mopar with a 575K guess. That was a 1966 four-door Hemi Coronet, likely the first one to be sold publicly in recent memory, whose new owner paid a whopping 600K to put in his garage. My measly 890K on Carroll Shelby’s ‘Super Snake” Cobra was nowhere
near the world-record 5M that car brought; the nearest bidder in our pool had guessed 1.5M. Then it started getting a little crazy, perhaps “goofy” was the right word.
Now we were over the gavel repeatedly. The two Chrysler FireArrow concepts cars each brought a million bucks. Bids in the room were as high as 2.5M on the first one, and 1.8M on the second. A Curious Yellow ’71 Hemi ‘Cuda, one of three, was estimated out as high as 1.5M by our crew, and it sold for less then a third of that at 470K, which was surprising as the ‘71s have been trading between private collectors for more recently and this was a one-of-three example (and me, the so-called expert, was out of a whole quarter with a 710K guess). The boat car used by the Russian cosmonauts barely cleared 150K, even after being hyped all weekend as a highlight.
When it was all over I had made a killing at $3.25 profit for the evening. The guys were good-hearted about their losses, though, and we hope we can get together and do it again next year. It was fun, and probably beats plane tickets, crowded aisles, and the sobering realization that, for most of us, the quality musclecar market has moved on to bigger and better things. Goofy or otherwise…
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