Pete Hamilton

Pete’s name will forever remain synonymous with his #40 Team Petty Superbird, and for good reason; he won the Daytona 500, the Alabama 500 at Talladega, and the Talladega 500 with the Superbird all in the same year! Those were his only three wins in 1970, but he managed to make more money that year than anyone else but his boss, Richard Petty. Hamilton began driving 1930s coupes on dirt tracks in the early sixties, but in 1968 he entered Grand National Racing with Ricky Hinton’s purple Ford Torino – he won Rookie of the Year. For 1969, he drove the gorgeous #1 Charger 500 of A.J. King in NASCAR and truly began making a name for himself, capturing Plymouth’s eye, who wanted to field a two Superbird Petty team for 1970, so they introduced him to Petty. When all the factories jumped out of NASCAR for 1971, Pete went over to Cotton Owens and drove his ’71 Road Runner. For 1972 and 1973 he drove the 1972 Road Runner of Housby Mack, then, after only six years of professional stock car racing and only sixty-four starts, Pete bowed out. However, he went on to work with Chrysler’s Larry Rathgeb to help design and initially build the Dodge and Plymouth “Kit Car” short track racers, which initially wore E-body skins but then more successfully moved on to the Aspen and Volare bodies. Few NASCAR drivers did more for Chrysler in just one short decade than Pete Hamilton.

Paul Candies & Leonard Hughes
(Candies & Hughes Racing Team)

We honor our longtime local heroes, Paul Candies and Leonard Hughes, who hailed from down on the bayou in Des Allemands, Louisiana. Hughes had been driving a variety of cars since the early sixties, and it was 1969 when he bumped into a younger gent named Paul Candies, who was a marketing genius and had helped build his father’s marine business into one of the largest operations on the Gulf Coast. Paul primarily rounded up sponsors and ran the organization, Leonard built the engines, oversaw the construction of the cars, and brought legendary drivers aboard like Richard Tharp and Mark Oswald. They won forty-five national events between 1970 and 1996, almost all with Plymouth funny cars or Plymouth sponsored Top Fuelers, five IHRA National Championships, and two NHRA National Champion-ships. Famed for their gorgeous blue cars with the beautiful gold leaf “Candies & Hughes” lettering, they were a “down home” operation that achieved national acclaim.

Will Elias (Bill) Stepp aka, “Billy the Kid”

Bill Stepp is one of the more curious and colorful Mopar race team owners who ever lived. Bill burst onto the scene in Pro Stock in huge fashion in 1970 with his Sox & Martin prepared Duster and Demon P/S cars, and he would remain very close to Sox & Martin throughout his racing days. Stepp was a bit notorious, and when he passed in 2008 he was called Miami Valley’s (Ohio), “most famous mobster, gangster, and hoodlum.” It was often pondered how Bill managed to stay out of prison and some believe it was because he had close ties to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. Regardless, his stable of Dusters, Demons, Darts, one Challenger, and later Plymouth Arrows and Dodge Colts were fan favorites nationwide, and while the team never achieved success in NHRA racing, they did at IHRA events, but moreover, Stepp knew the money was in match racing, so there were countless “grudge races” with the biggest names in Pro Stock, and consequently, his cars were always in the headlines.

Sam Posey

Sam Posey is one of automotive history’s all-time great race drivers. When he was fourteen, Sam bought a 300SL Mercedes and taught himself how to drive and race with that car on his family’s farm! His true claim-to-fame would come to rise in Formula 1 cars, Can Am cars, and Indy cars, but for 1970, Sam was all-about Dodges and he’s become forever linked with the Trans Am program. Posey drove both the #76 and #77 lime green Challengers in the Trans Am series in 1970 for Dodge, and managed to finish fourth overall in the national points series chase. While he’s famed for that feat, few Mopar fans remember that he started the year driving Cotton Owens’ red/black #6 1969 Charger 500 at Riverside in his one-and-only NASCAR race. He qualified ninth, but a mechanical problem sidelined him early in the event and he concentrated on the Trans Am series after that.

Jim Ramsey & Joe Schulte, The Young & Rubicam Ad Agency

(Inventors of the Plymouth Rapid Transit System)

Joe Schulte had been developing the wild cartoonish artwork for Plymouth since 1968, and with the extraordinary success of the Scat Pack campaign at Dodge, Plymouth wanted something similar. It was largely Ramsey and Schulte who came up with the Rapid Transit System campaign, which didn’t arrive until 1970, but it arrived with a bang! One-upping Dodge a bit, the RTS had its own rolling road show consisting of unique custom-built show cars, cutaway engines, displays of performance parts, and they teamed up with Sox & Martin to expand their Performance Clinics at dealerships. The RTS also came on strong with jackets, posters, wild ads and commercials, and just about every kind of promotional thing you could think of, including candy dishes, mugs; you name it. While short-lived, the Rapid Transit System made a major impact in 1970 and 1971 before being laid to rest in 1972. The program remains synonymous with Plymouth performance cars.

Ross Roy Advertising Agency
(The Scat Pack Concept)

We wish we could point out some singular names, but the birth of Dodge’s “Scat Pack” program seems to have been a major team effort by their Ross Roy Ad Agency. With their bolder muscle cars coming out in 1968, Dodge wanted to promote them in a big way, and Ross Roy invented an entirely new concept in automotive promotion. Every performance car Dodge offered in 1968 came with stripes across their rumps, which Ross Roy quickly dubbed “Bumble Bee Stripes,” and every one of those cars became a member of the “Scat Pack” – a name admittedly lifted from the famed “Rat Pack” of early sixties fame. The program was unique; they had jackets, posters, souvenirs and decals of all kinds, and every buyer of a new performance Dodge was eligible for free membership in the Scat Pack Club, which meant they got magazines in the mail forevermore (actually catalogs), so that Dodge could continue to sell them performance parts after they’d bought the car. The famed Scat Pack Bee (and Super Bee) came out of this effort, and it was likely the most successful promotional campaign of the muscle car era, and Dodge continued using it to their advantage all the way through the end of 1971. Heaven only knows how many cars this program sold, and more importantly, how many youngsters it snagged who could get a cool jacket or coloring book or drinking mugs, but weren’t old enough to drive yet. To this day, it’s scarce to see any muscle car Dodge that doesn’t have a “Scat Pack Club” decal in the quarter window.

The “Nash Bridges” - 1971 ‘Cuda Convertible

It was Don Johnson himself who decided his character in the Nash Bridges television show should drive a bright yellow 1971 ‘Cuda convertible. Frank Benito was tasked with building the first cars, and showing the production crew’s naivety about these cars, he called California E-body guru Ed Briggs and told him he needed three 1971 ‘Cuda convertibles, all had to be four-speeds, and he needed them within a week! He got a strong dose of “that’s not possible” and Briggs talked him into buying three 1970 ‘Cudas and Barracudas and converting all of them to look like 1971 models. The close-up hero car was a restored factory blue 1970 ‘Cuda 340 four-speed convert with rubber bumpers and a Shaker hood! All three cars were painted Lemon Twist yellow, sent to the set, and Don Johnson blew the motor up in the hero car, which was then replaced with a 360. The camera crews didn’t like the bright yellow paint after shooting the pilot episodes, so all three cars were repainted a darker “Caterpillar Yellow” which is the same thing Caterpillar was using on all their heavy equipment. A fourth car, an actual 1971 Barracuda convertible, was added to the fleet as their primary stunt/jump car throughout the series. The yellow convertible proved to be the most popular mainstream television star Mopar since the Dukes of Hazzard. All four of the show’s cars still exist today, with two of them having been restored to ’71 Hemicuda clone status. The hero car, which Don Johnson had initially kept for himself, was famously treated to a ground-up restoration by Dave Ferro of Totally Auto, who installed a Hemi and 833 four-speed and detailed the car like it had been built that way to begin with.