'70 Plymouth GTX Hardtop - In the Car 2525

Do you remember the song "In The Year 2525," by Zager & Evans?

If you don't remember it, thank you. That up tempo, yet depressing song was the only hit record those guys ever had. It reached number one on Billboard magazine's "Hot 100" singles chart in mid-July of 1969, stayed there for six weeks, then those guys never had another hit after that.

While that song was on its way down the charts like the spent first stage of Apollo 11's Saturn V moon rocket that tumbled through space that summer, this GTX rolled off the line at Ma Mopar's Los Angeles Assembly Plant in Bellflower, California. Per its VIN number, it's the 2,525th car off the line at that plant during the '70 model run, one of 4,927 440 Magnum/727 GTX's that ChryCo built out of a total, both-body-styles/all-engines/all-assembly-plants GTX run of 7,748.

That car spent its life in the Western U.S. until the early '90s, when Dave Drozdowski found it via an ad in his local Sunday paper. Turns out that a miner of motive metal had bought this car from its last Arizona owner, then hauled it up to Michigan for sale.

Dave went to see it, took a good look at it, then bought it and took it to his Shelby Township, Michigan, home--where his wife instantly said, "Are you sure?" when Dave said that this car would be restored in a minimal amount of time for only a few grand.

If you're going to miss your time and cost estimates by as big a margin as Dave did, it helps to start with a car that had little rust and/or crash damage on it. Especially if all the original paint, vinyl top, soft trim and weatherstripping had been devoured by the sands of time blowing through the blazing Arizona sky.

In a nutshell, it took him about four years to get it to the condition you see it in here. Major help was done by: Don Witkowski at The Collision Shop in Clinton Township, Michigan (body and paint work), Shelby Auto Trim in Sterling Heights, Michigan (who re-did the seats and interior trim with Year One-sourced repros), Performance Car Graphics in Tallahassee, Florida (Gauge cluster resto), Classic Auto Air in Tampa (who restored the heater and OEM Chrysler Airtemp A/C system), and D&S Engines (who rebuilt the 440 and added hardened valve seats for unleaded-fuel operation).

The GTX was done in time for that year's Woodward Dream Cruise, where Dave and Nancy received tons of compliments for their Lime Light-colored cruiser. Since then, they've shown it a bunch of times around Southeastern Michigan, scoring a number of First Place trophies.

By the way: During the resto, Dave had the OEM AM radio replaced by an original Mopar AM/FM, which pulls in today's Detroit-area music stations (especially since legendary AM powerhouses "Keener 13" and "The Big 8" are no more.)

As for Zager & Evans . . . Bob Seger had more songs chart (at least in Detroit) than Z&E before he did "Night Moves!"