CHAPTER TWENTY 1965 PLYMOUTH
By Geoff Stunkard
SOLID GOLD
The Golden Commandos ’65 Plymouth
altered-wheelbase car survives
Mike Guffey’s research showed the Plymouth wore steel wheels almost all season in 1965. BF
Goodrich 7.1 × 15 Lifesavers, new old stock, are up front; 10.0 M&H Racemaster slicks — also
vintage — are on the rear. Details abound, including the big pin wingnuts, vintage decal
remnants, rear window hold-down straps and tune-up specs painted on the firewall.
Vintage race cars often lead hard lives. After whatever fame they attained for their owner, these generally well-used machines began a slow downward spiral. In drag racing, that often means alterations or upgrades desired by subsequent owners, changes that left much of the surviving history on the scrap pile. After they were no longer competitive, they would be parted out for their components and parked someplace where the elements and time slowly returned them to dirt. Once located by someone who understands what the hulk is, the desire to simply “rebody” the entire vehicle is often a serious temptation.
Few drag cars are as widely desired as the original altered-wheelbase hardtops Chrysler created in 1965. That was a season when the MoPar troops were protesting NASCAR rules on the Hemi, and money was redirected toward the quarter-mile. By radically changing the wheelbase beneath the vehicles to move the weight forward, the 11 creations by a Detroit subcontractor named Amblewagon under factory direction became the basis for the term “funny car.”
The engine is a vintage 1966 Hemi mill with aluminum heads and all the correct pieces for
the Hilborn fuel injection, including a two-gallon Eelco tank, oversize fuel filter and factory-
approved belt-driven pump.
Few drag cars are as widely desired as the
original altered-wheelbase hardtops Chrysler
created in 1965.
Those cars went to select drivers nationwide. The Plymouth featured here was presented to the Golden Commandos team, which consisted of Plymouth factory engineers, with former corporate lawyer Al “The Lawman” Eckstrand as the driver that year. The team traveled from Detroit only for the largest events, including the notorious first-ever 1965 Super Stock Magazine Nationals in York, Pa., that August. NHRA considered this event a literal “drag strip riot,” with more than 25,000 fans along the apron of the air-landing-strip-turned-race-track long past midnight to see some of the sport’s biggest names duke it out. When the final for Unlimited Fuel was called, it was none other than Eckstrand against the noted Dodge of “Dandy” Dick Landy. Eckstrand beat the feared Landy’s Dodge, a hole shot-assisted 9.67 seconds to a losing 9.58.
The following year, at the same event (held at New York National Speedway in Long Island), it was Commandos team member John Dallifor driving this car. He won the heads-up 2,700-lb. Fuel title on Saturday and then went three rounds in the handicap-style Super Eliminator run-offs on Sunday, clocking a very fast 9.06 on nitro during the losing run. The well-used altered 1965 Plymouth went to a new owner late in 1966 when the team produced a new Barracuda for funny car racing.
The car showed up around Detroit strips painted red and blue as “Mission: Impossible” and then disappeared for over a decade. Collector Steve Atwell eventually met a local Detroit-area Super Stock racer who mentioned his brother owned “a funny-wheelbase car.” Atwell saw it and verified it was indeed real “gold,” and then spent two years working out a way to buy it. He in turn sold it to the late Dick Towers, a noted historian from Santa Ana, Calif.
I first saw this car in Southern California as a hulk almost 20 years ago at Towers’ shop. Dick was a former Classic Lincoln expert with a passion for MoPar drag racing. Like the others in that batch, the Plymouth had been acid-dipped, weakening the body and unitized frame. The floors looked like wrinkled brown paper bags even when new, the roof had nearly fallen off from race fatigue, and I-beams were welded on top of the team’s ca.-1965 subframe connectors. Between his growing photo archive and prewar restoration work, Towers worked on it when time allowed, but he was careful not to take any more history from the car than necessary. However, it was Mike Guffey, one of Dick’s closest friends, who finally finished the car.
Dick Towers sits behind the wheel of the car that he cared for during a 20-plus-year
ownership. Here, he is joined by the crew that helped bring his old car back to the
track. Dick’s son Richard Towers is next to the door. Dick Towers passed away just
weeks after this photo was taken.
“When Mike came around and began talking about wanting it, and was willing to pay me what I felt this car was worth, I knew it was time to let it go,” said Towers shortly before his death in late 2009. “Some other guys had bugged me about it, but I knew they would have wanted to rebody it; Mike was one of the only people I would have sold this car to.”
Guffey is an Indiana race car collector whose willingness to go to extremes to maintain originality is legendary. Guffey had sold the 1965 Landy Dodge, and used some of that money to buy the Commandos car and do it right.
Today, all the vintage fiberglass is original, as is the windshield and rear window. It took 10 hours to carefully cut the I-beams out and grind the welds off the paper-thin floor. After the car was wrecked in 1966, the passenger side door had been patched shut with no window frame; Guffy and his guys did re-create that, putting new side glass in the car as well. Foam was sprayed into the roof area, but it’s still original.
The original single low-back driver’s seat was still intact, though someone had begun adding button-tuft upholstery to it. Kramer Automotive Specialties supplied correct carpet; Gary Ball Reproductions supplied the seat skin, headliner and door panels; and Guffy and friend Troy Fairchild did most of the installation work themselves in Guffy’s shop. Indianapolis’ Tommy Mitchell is responsible for the paint, while Jim Studinski, a sign guy and pinstriper who once did work for Logghe in Detroit during the 1960s, expertly applied the gold leaf and lettering.
Race car expert Erik Lindberg of Liberty Performance in Minnesota received the car after a static debut in 2008 at the All-Hemi Reunion in Ohio; he built and installed a solid short-block with a correct Hilborn outfit and rare 1965 K-series aluminum heads from Guffey’s stash, a reverse valve body TorqueFlite and a 4.56 rear pumpkin. It looked great, and Towers, who had been diagnosed with an untreatable form of cancer, finally got a chance to actually ride in the rare car.
During the Flatlander Fling in Nebraska in 2009, Lindberg strapped in as the pilot, and Towers rode as a passenger in the shotgun seat while the car was driven hard for a few 60-foot launches at Kearney Raceway Park. The car, fragile and original, will never have to prove its worth by running through the lights at speed. To even see it under power was a truly memorable experience. Thanks to the collectors involved, the Golden Commandos 1965 Plymouth is as original as any altered-wheelbase restoration can be, a surviving reflection of the golden age of drag racing.