The biggest OOPS of my life. I bought a 4-speed, 68 Hemi Cart LO23 car back in 1988. It was painted a flat, red lacquer (never buffed out) and had a lot of vintage race hemi parts with it including an NOS 1970 iron block and a magnesium crossram still in the box with Dick Landy Enterprises on the label. (I thought that was who sold the crossram - not who it was mailed to. DOH!)

I bought the car just to get the engine and then quickly resold the race car. It was so heavily tubbed and modified in the back and the firewall, so I would have had to buy an extra 68 Dart just to acquire the rear wheel wells to restore it back.

I never bothered to buff out the paint or look closer. Had I sanded just a little I would have found Dick Landy's original paint job underneath it all.

It turned out to be this car.

Ugh!

some more

Wow....awesome story!

Wow, great story even though you let the car go. It looks like the transmission tunnel has been reinforced (for good reason).

The entire trans tunnel, and from the rear seat to the tail light panel had been fabricated by later racer/owners. So it would have taken an entire 68 Dart underbodyr from cowl to tail rear bumper crossmember to restore the car. Far more work than me or anyone I worked with back then, could ever manage to do on our own.

Crazy thing is that it still retained its original half-thickness sheetmetal doors and seat belt strap-activated windows (no internal regulators for weight savings) as well as the original seats and brackets and the entire, unaltered factory glass fenders and hood. And if you look closely at the photo, you can see that the odometer was between 2 and 3/10ths, making it read all of one quarter mile!

The photo of the front spindles shows how tricky Dick Landy was. He cut and rewelded the spindles so they resulted in a wheelbase offset of an inch, moving the front tires forward without anyone being the wiser.

Lucky you don't suffer from PTSD, from all the significant cars that passed through your hands. I'm familiar with the pain, but damn!!!

https://i.postimg.cc/ZRCRM6kZ/iuyt.jpg

https://i.postimg.cc/HxRxDjHM/DSC-0030.jpg