{"id":81475,"date":"2024-09-19T08:24:00","date_gmt":"2024-09-19T12:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dodgegarage.com\/news-api\/?p=81475"},"modified":"2024-09-17T11:50:46","modified_gmt":"2024-09-17T15:50:46","slug":"1958-plymouth-with-challenger-srt-demon-170-power-draws-big-crowds-at-roadkill-nights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/owners-clubs\/2024\/09\/1958-plymouth-with-challenger-srt-demon-170-power-draws-big-crowds-at-roadkill-nights.html","title":{"rendered":"1958 Plymouth with Challenger SRT\u00ae Demon 170 Power Draws Big Crowds at Roadkill Nights"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There were a ton of stunning show cars in the Cruise-In area at 2024 Roadkill Nights Powered by Dodge<\/a>, but one of my favorites in the show field wasn\u2019t parked with the rest of the display vehicles. Instead, the stunning Plymouth shown here was parked in the Direct Connection display area on the west side of the grounds, but with this flawless classic showcasing the most powerful production engine in American automotive industry history! This Challenger SRT\u00ae<\/sup> Demon 170-powered Plymouth was a popular piece of eye candy for many attendees.<\/p>\n\n\n

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When I first saw this beautiful 1958 Plymouth at the media preview for 2024 Roadkill Nights Powered by Dodge, the hood was closed. I am a huge fan of \u201cChristine cars\u201d \u2013 such as the 1957\/1958 Plymouth Fury, Belvedere and Savoy models \u2013 known within their community as the Forward Look Mopar\u00ae<\/sub> vehicles. While they are commonly painted red to match the movie car, this one is painted a unique metallic blue that I really think pops with its chrome trim on the curvy body, so it drew my attention right away even when I didn\u2019t know what was under the hood. Then one of the men cleaning off the car opened the hood, revealing the engine from a 2023 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon 170. I quickly introduced myself to that man, who turned out to be the builder and an expert in these vehicles, \u201cFury Jim\u201d Rawa. He then introduced me to the owner of the car, Vinny Pipitone, and the two provided me the details on how this gorgeous classic Plymouth named Darlene came to exist.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Jim Rawa, better known as Fury Jim among the Forward Look Mopar community, owns a private shop in southern New Jersey, where he builds cars primarily for his own collection and exclusive clients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI only build for close friends\/private clients, however my builds are known worldwide within their genre, as well as being the only individual offering select reproduction\/upgrade parts for \u201957\/\u201958 Plymouths, such as the aluminum \u201cSportone\u201d inserts featured on Darlene, and also seen on Mark Worman\u2019s [Graveyard Carz] \u201cHellephant Christine\u201d that I helped him with, featured at SEMA along with Ferber\u2019s Demoness featured this past fall. Other proprietary innovations are my horn center quartz clock, and stock appearing full gauge compliment seen on Darlene.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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Rawa bought this 1957 Plymouth Savoy coupe for himself back in 2001 from a woman named Darlene and he owned it until the summer of 2011. That was when Pipitone\u2019s fiancee came to Rawa and asked about buying a \u201cChristine car\u201d for Vinny as a wedding gift. Rawa and Pipitone had been good friends since the late 1990s, so not only did he agree to sell this Plymouth to Vinny, but he delivered it to him.<\/p>\n\n\n

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When Jim Rawa delivered this 1957 Plymouth to Vinny Pipitone, it was painted flat black with wide white wall tires, it had very little interior and it was powered by a stock 301-cubic-inch V8 mated to a PowerFlite transmission. As Rawa puts it, Pipitone was \u201cecstatic\u201d to get his 1957 Plymouth as it sat, but a year later, it had been sent back to Fury Jim for a rebuild. Shortly before Rawa tore into the build, both he and Pipitone found out that they were about to have their first child, so the build was put on hold. In fact, it sat dormant until 2020, at which point it got back underway.<\/p>\n\n\n

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At that point, the plan was for the car to look as it does here converted to 1958 Belvedere appearance, but the intended drivetrain would be a big block Mopar stroker build, but re-doing the body took much longer than originally planned. Once the body was removed from the chassis on a rotisserie, Rawa found a shortage of good replacement body panels, leading to extensive custom fabrication work that would be spread out over the course of the next year. However, in December of 2023, this project got its big injection of power in the form of the SRT Demon 170 engine that they scored through a mistake on the Direct Connection website.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s not the C170 crate engine, however due to a website glitch, 2(?) orders were placed at the end of November before Direct Connection disabled the ‘buy now’ option. So in talking with the Direct Connection team, we were sold one of the 17 warranty engines that were in stock at the time, sent fully dressed including the body harness, for dealer replacement use.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rawa went on to explain that installing the 1,025-horsepower engine in the \u201950s era Plymouth was far from plug-and-play.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cDirect Connection does not support the E85 engine with any type of harness currently, I had to heavily modify a Hellephant crate harness mated with the body harness of the Demon 170 that was on the engine, including recreating all original wiring from scratch as no replacement harnesses are available.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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The power from that engine is sent to the rear differential by means of a 1965 Chrysler 727 automatic transmisison and while the case and output\/tail shaft are stock, everything inside is heavily modified billet and forged components from CRT to handle upwards of a thousand horsepower. This includes a custom torque convertor from PTC and a Denny\u2019s nitrous-ready driveshaft sending power to the Currie Enterprises 9\u201d rear differential fitted with 3.50 gears and 35-spline axles. The rear suspension uses Calvert split monoleaf springs with Caltracs bars, with fully boxed rear rails, a relocated spring position, and reinforced mounts. Up front, Rawa has installed his in-house polyurethane suspension bushings in the stock suspension setup with late B-body spindles, fitted with drilled and slotted 12-inch brake rotors. The B-body disc brake upgrade is something that Rawa has perfected over the years, having assisted over 150 owners of Forward Look Mopar vehicles in installing the system in their own cars, in addition to installing in more than 40 builds of his own.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Rawa went on to explain that this is one of his few builds where he has not built every component of the vehicle, but he has done everything except for build the engine, rear, seat upholstery, along with TIG welding by Wayne Ransom on the fabricated header. The engine was obviously built by Mopar and the rear diff is a custom-build unit from Currie Enterprises, but everything else about this car was handled by Jim Rawa \u2013 body, chassis and interior, including a variety of upgrades inside that are so clean, they appear to be stock.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cI designed and created the door panels from a design I pictured using modified \u201957 Belvedere stainless, and features the same \u201958 pattern aluminum panels I make my Sportone inserts from. The seats are basically \u201957 Fury pattern sewn by \u201cCharlie Suede\u201d, recreated with soft Italian black leather, with silver tinsel piping, and \u201cJackie-O\u201d cloth.\u00a0I had to cut and restructure the seat frames to \u201cFury style\u201d with dips, and made the rear seat dip 1\u201d deeper to accommodate the Demon emblem instead of the Forward Look emblem found on a Fury. The dash has been heavily modified to accommodate the A\/C vents while appearing stock to the general public, the glove box was moved 4\u201d to the left, radio \u00bd\u201d to the right with the bezel re-shaped before chrome plating, other contour changes to the dash structure to accommodate a full padded dash [currently only the 3rd in existence – I did this on 2 of my others since 2018], plus my proprietary gauge appointments previously mentioned.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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The exterior paint is Jeep\u00ae<\/sub> Bikini Pearl over a gray base rather than metallic, giving it a deeper tone than the same paint on a new Jeep. The roof is painted white with a touch of the Bikini Pearl added, giving it a slight blue tint, and the whole car is finished in American iCon clear. Finally, this car weighs around 3,800 pounds, giving it a significantly better power-to-weight ratio than the actual \u201923 SRT Demon 170.<\/p>\n\n\n

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When the hood is closed, the only indications that this 1958 Plymouth is not stock is the Demon 170 logo placed subtly in the upper middle area of the rear seat. If you look underneath, the Caltracs would suggest that it is probably a little healthier than stock, but with 275-60-15 BFGoodrich tires out back, most people would not guess that it has an engine with over a thousand horsepower under the hood. However, as gorgeous as it is, this is not just a show car, and there are big plans to do some serious driving with this Demon 170-powered classic in the near future.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cThis is not a trailer queen, it’s already seen 120 mph in early tuning stages, we cruised Woodward Saturday night after the event and easily breaks traction from an 80 mph roll, which is fun! Back home in NJ, Vinny and I have had a few lively driving sessions as well! I think there are a solid hundred miles on her since the event, but not pushing hard yet, the PCM provided has been extensively tuned by Bill Cocoma from Sinister Mopar with remote mapping by MG tuning, PWM had to be eliminated, and I\u2019ll be adding Softboost and re-tuning after the next event labor day weekend is over,\u201d said Rawa.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cVinny plans to use this car as a cross-country driver within the year, just keeping her pretty until next summer or so. The A\/C blows ice cold, which included heavily modifying the firewall to accommodate the 4-season Super Gen II vintage air setup, including relocating the wiper motor and making linkage from scratch to clear all the new equipment under the dash.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There were a ton of stunning show cars in the Cruise-In area at 2024 Roadkill Nights Powered by Dodge, but one of my favorites in the show field wasn\u2019t parked with the rest of the display vehicles. Instead, the stunning Plymouth shown here was parked in the Direct Connection display area on the west side of the grounds, but with this flawless classic showcasing the most powerful production engine in American automotive industry history! This Challenger SRT\u00ae Demon 170-powered Plymouth was a popular piece of eye candy for many attendees. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":81495,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2624],"tags":[2949],"class_list":["post-81475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-owners-clubs","tag-plymouth-classics"],"acf":[],"custom_fields":{"post_thumbnail_image":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/1957PlymouthDarlene_Feature.jpg","social_image":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/1957PlymouthDarlene_Social.jpg","icon_selection":"article","external_link":"","featured_article":[],"upload_background_image":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81475"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81475"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81553,"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81475\/revisions\/81553"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.api.dodgegarage.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}