1969 Dodge Dart - Top Down And Flyin'

Whether building a performance car for the street or the strip, optimizing traction is always beneficial. While building a full-chassis race car or back-halving your car for giant tires is a great option to achieve optimal traction, the cost prohibits most of us from going to this extreme. Since this '67 Barracuda project is on a tight budget, we won't be altering the suspension of this car too far from the factory specifications. In fact, we won't even mini-tub it, so our biggest limitation to traction will be the tires we can fit into our factory wheelwells. We will, however, optimize traction by replacing worn items with quality components, upgrading the shocks and springs, and setting up the chassis using a few tricks we've learned over the years. Even though we're working on a dedicated racer, our techniques can be applied to your street car with similar results.

Going fast with huge rear tires is cool, but going fast with tires that fit into a stock wheel opening is even cooler. Plus, the expense of back-halving our project car would have eaten up a significant portion of our budget, so we decided to make the best of our Mopar's factory front and rear suspension.

Last month, we installed our Strange 60 rearend, along with Super Stock leaf springs and an aftermarket pinion snubber. This month, we'll install new Just Suspension front end bushings, mid-'70s A-Body front disc brakes, and Strange Engineering double-adjustable race shocks on all four corners. These modifications should get our A-Body launching straight and hard, and help us achieve our goal of sub-1.50-second 60-foot times.