Darren and Dale purchased this car from a friend of mine in 1984, it was their first car. Dale was just 14, but before he turned 16 he had bought out Darren, and the car was solely his.
When I dropped a 440 in my 73 Cuda, the Duster ended up with my low compression 340 to replace the slant six. After a series of 340s and 360s, I convinced him to go 440 in 1995. After just two years as a BB car, with a best of 10.74 (street car with a plate) he sold it rolling for the money to buy his first back halved, ladder bar race car, a 70 AMX he still owns today.
Twelve years later, he got a call from the guy he sold it to, asking if Dale wanted the car back because his Grandpa wanted it out of his field. The opportunity to get your first car back was one Dale couldn't pass up, so he grabbed a trailer and brought it home. He decided then and there it would be his son's first car.
I tried to talk him out of the idea. It had been sitting without tires and wheels, so the bottom of the quarters were in the soft, moist Oklahoma dirt and were rotted away. It still carried all the dents and scars from Dale's formative years, as well as all the mistakes he made on his first foray into hot rodding.
I had located several rust-free AZ bodies, and tried to convince him to just take a few parts from the original car to build his son a new Duster, but he was not deterred. Until Boone presented him with the opportunity to take it on Drag Week 2016, I really felt like the car would be destined to languish away in his backyard, always on the back burner. Now they had five months to turn it from a scrap heap relic into a functional 9 second street car. Dale's old personalized plate for the car was "Sizzler"...it seemed appropriate now because it was on the front burner, and the fire was turned up high!
"Livin' in a powder keg and givin' off sparks"
4 Street cars, 5 Race engines
