I cut up a really nice 73 340 Duster and converted into one of these dirt track cars. That was probably in the mid 1980s, unfortunately I don't have any pictures of it. I was working in a factory, and one of the guys told me he had this 73 Duster he had to get rid of. He said he had to pull the 340 out of it because the heads were both cracked, and he replaced the 340 with a high miles 318. His wife wanted a different car, and he had to sell the Duster. $125 bought it. The car had a rear quarter panel that was crunched behind the rear wheel, and the old 318 was really tired. After I bought the car, he told me that he changed the mag wheels one time, and a few miles later that rear wheel came off the car. Then he told me his insurance bought him a new rear quarter, but he never got it installed. He would be happy if I took that too, so he could get it out of his basement. While we were retrieving the Plymouth stamped replacement full rear quarter, he asked me if I wanted the junk 340 too, for an extra $50. While we were loading the 340, he told me that the reason he had to replace it was because he was putting a set of headers on the 340, but when he pulled off the exhaust manifolds, antifreeze started running onto the ground (for those of you that don't know, the exhaust manifold studs screw into the water jacket on the small block heads. When he pulled the nuts off, a couple studs in each head came out with the nuts, there was nothing wrong with the 340 that resealing the studs wouldn't fix!) I told him that, but he didn't care! The car had 55,000 miles on it, and the motor was pulled 2 years before, making it roughly a 50,000 mile 340. So I cruised the Duster most of the summer, the 318 had some rod knock, that was growing worse. I was dirt track racing at the time, and we had just killed our car the week before season championship. I needed a new dirt track car, and that $125 Duster with the dead 318 was it. The car was built using the Mopar Kit Car roll cage design powered by a 400 big block Mopar. The car turned out to be on the light weight side for the class we ran, but we managed to get by. I ran that car 3 years as a car owner with a new to racing driver every year, then pulled the front fenders and ran it in our tracks "new" modified class for a year and part of the last season before I sold it. In the the first 4 of the 5 years I ran the car (as an owner), the car finished in the top 10 in points in the class the car in. I helped the guy that bought the car from me, that was trying to keep his teenager from getting deeper into trouble, I stuck with them for that last part of that season, so they could keep racing. That plan worked out well too, but by the time the kid was done with the season, the car was done too, but the process kept the kid from getting into more trouble. The family moved out of the area, but the Dad caught up with me several years later. He told me his son had graduated from college, and got a job driving for a guy that was running a Factory road course racing team.
The Jalopy Journal
