Aar 'Cuda Road America Test

Aar ’Cuda Road America Test 

- Mark Ehlen

As a production engineer for a major aircraft manufacturer, Bob (who asked we didn’t publish his last name) is one of those people who can take the big picture and break it down into lots of little tiny pieces in order to realize every last speck of performance possible from each one. But far from a stuffy nerd, Bob is also a motorhead who grew up with a preference for Mopars, starting with his dad’s 1967 four-speed 273 Dart convertible.

Like so many of us, money for adult toys can be tough to come by when the kids are still at home, but Bob found some relief racing 1:10-scale RC cars with his son, Alex. Turns out the kid had some talent, so soon they were racing competitively as a father/ son team.

Bob used his engineering acumen to improve the handling of the cars and, in the process, learned much about how to improve cornering performance. As much fun as he was having, though, RC cars were only a temporary fix for Bob’s real passion to build a full size car for the track. Well, the kids grew up, cash loosened up, and Bob eventually went looking for his dream car, an AAR ’Cuda, which he found at a Mecum auction in January 2012. He actually found two of them, but just had to go with the numbers-matching one.

The car had been “restored,” purchased by a flipper and then sold at Mecum, but it wasn’t up to Bob’s standards of excellence, so off it went to Muscle Car Restorations in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Bob had been following MCR through the features and tech articles he had seen in the various magazines for the last decade, so there was no question about who was going to do his AAR. The goal was a perfect restoration with modifications that could test the limits of what the stock suspension could do, but could also be undone so as to not ruin the car’s originality.