Randy Burg is flying the Mopar flag.
Randy Burg's got a thing for Mopars. His first car was a '65 GTO in 1967, but eventually he fell into a comfort zone with the Mopar crowd and has never looked back. That means fast cars, too, not just wimpy wannabes that only sound like the real thing. "Right now, the slowest car in the family is my wife's Z06 Corvette. She hates it when I say that."
Indeed, the Burgs have a penchant for Pentastar power. You may remember a story we did in Oct. '05 called "440 Flashback," where we followed along as Randy power-tuned his 440 Dart and squeezed a decent 12.65 at 108.51 out of a relatively mild 440 and a four-speed. This small-block Swinger makes that big-block look tame.
"I originally bought this '69 Dart Swinger for my daughter, Chelsea, to drive in high school. She drove it for a couple of years but got tired of no air conditioning and poor gas mileage, so I bought it back." The first thing Randy did was flog the little 340 automatic on the dragstrip, but soon the Swinger began to lose its edge. Randy suspected the cam. "After we pulled the cam, we noticed that the cam bearings were wiped out. We couldn't change cam bearings without pulling the engine, so the engine came out. Next we checked the mains, and they looked just as bad as the cam bearings-right down to the copper backing." Thus began the path to more power by way of a stroker crank.
"I talked to Bob Mazzolini in Riverside, California, and he suggested putting a stroker crank in it." That's when this story really got interesting. Rather than tweak the original 340, Randy scoured up a 4.030-inch-bore 360, and Bob supplied a 4.00-inch stroker MP crank and piston package that bumped the displacement up to 408 ci. Next came all the attendant pieces, including a set of Edelbrock aluminum heads that Randy painted Mopar Orange to add to the subterfuge factor.
That's what Randy likes to do. Appearances can be deceiving, and from the outside, this little Swinger looks like a refugee from a 1969 Dodge Boys ad. He's even got those Dodge Scat Pack decals in the quarter-window. The closest object to something post-1969 is the Sony CD player that sits under the dash near the Auto Meter tach and gauges. Other than those additions, this could clearly be a case of arrested development.
But with more inches under the hood, this Dart is right on target with a ton more torque than the original A-motor. Randy's only driven this Dart on eighth-mile tracks, so he has no quarter-mile times. But in the eighth, this stock-appearing Swinger has hit a best of 7.63 at 89.9 mph. According to our official Pocket Dyno decoder ring, that's equivalent to 11.70s, which will make even the most jaded big-block fan take notice. Credit needs to also be assigned to the set of 3.91 gears and especially to the pair of gummy BFGoodrich Drag Radials that help this 3,000-pound flyweight really scream.
Randy's other Dart now has the stroker big-block out of his son's B-body that has since been sold. So Randy's now got a pair of Darts to draw from. Either one can set you back in the seat-all the way back to 1969.