Magazine sleuth work revealed the fact that while the Hurst-built Hemi A-Body Darts and Barracudas wore no external Hemi identification badges, Dick Landy applied rectangular Hemi emblems-of the type used on '68 Hemi Chargers-to the doors of his four-speed car and painted a simple Hemi Dart logo on the white bumblebee tail stripe. Photos show the automatic car lacked these details. Instead, its doors were emblem free, and he painted a Dodge logo on the trunk stripe. Armed with these tidbits, Daryl ran to the car and sure enough, inside each doorskin were two body-filler worms where the holes for the added Hemi emblem studs had been hastily plugged long ago.
But it takes a lot more than a single happy coincidence to establish true provenance. After all, maybe all he really had were original doors bolted to a non-Landy Hemi Dart. So Daryl kept going. Noting the Darts were often photographed with nonfactory-issued chrome wheel lip molding, he checked the car and found the telltale screw holes. Then he got wind that former team driver Bob Lambeck was holding the fender tags to two '68 Hemi Darts. A call confirmed one tag belonged to Bob's personal Dart, but the other was removed from one of Dick Landy's two Darts prior to its sale in the early '70s. Did the sequence number stamped into the metal tag match the VIN displayed on Daryl's Dart? When Daryl read the LO23M8B297859 VIN into the telephone, Bob happily confirmed a match, and full Bob status was confirmed. Yes, Bob sent the matched fender tag to Daryl for reunion with the car. Incidentally, the automatic-equipped Dart has also survived and is currently owned by a noted Michigan collector.
Knowing Dick Landy was one of the first to suffer at the hands of unscrupulous rip-off artists who slathered his name-without permission-on completely bogus cars in the '80s, Daryl assembled all the details and clues and approached him for verification in 1998. After a brief time, he confirmed the fact that it was his old car and graciously granted Daryl permission to letter the body with his name. OK, you'd think Daryl would whip out the paint and that'd be the end of things, right? Remember we said this car bounced around for a while? Well Daryl sat on the car and even got started on the paintwork. But life got in the way and he sold it to its current owner, Pat Goff, as a semifinished roller.
Ironically, this was the second time Pat held the title. Let's rewind the clock a little bit to learn more. If you thought the Mopar Street Hemi collector world was close knit, you don't want to know about the guys who collect the Race Hemi cars. Produced in far fewer quantities (like less than 400 cars total), these cross-rammed '64 and '65 B-Bodies and '68 Hemi A-Bodies enjoy an elite status among Hemi collectors, and the guys who buy, sell, and trade them are the hardest of the hard-core about verifying the origins of their cars. That's why we were shocked to learn the Landy Dart passed through the hands of several well-informed fanatics without being detected.
Let's recap the roster of guys who should have caught it but didn't. Soon after Kenny Nichols got it from Landy around 1971, it ended up at Barnett Race Cars in Atlanta. Next, a Connecticut racer named Ron bought it from Barnett in 1974 as a rolling chassis with the paint stripped to bare steel and fiberglass. Ron delivered the car to Lindblad Race Cars in Massachusetts, where it was tubbed and caged. At the time, the Dick Landy connection was only four or five years prior, recent history worthy of notice, but not a reason to celebrate, so a coat of solid red paint was applied. For unknown reasons, Ron never completed the car and it sat in a Connecticut warehouse until 1986.
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