There's a reason villains wear black. Picture Darth Vader in a hunter green suit and mask. They'd have laughed him right out of the rebel base on Hoth. Or how about Lee Van Cleef's character in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly? Which one was he? The Bad. What color did he wear? Black.
And so it is with Jody Holdren's Barracuda. Look at it parked on the side of the road in the lead image. Sitting on huge ET Streets and dressed in black enamel, this Barracuda is pure badass, and it's just looking for a fight.
This is a car Jody has owned for more than half his life. He traded the owner a Kawasaki KZ 500 for this car. And this was a Kaw he traded some other guy a Ventura for. Jody's good at making things happen.
Even though this Barracuda was originally a 318 car, it had a 340 under the hood when Jody acquired it. He immediately yanked that engine and traded it for a 440, complete with headers and a transmission. "It was a fairly basic, 11.0:1 engine, and I had it in the car till about 2002," Jody says. It's fairly basic, but also fairly quick, and Jody's been racing this car for years.
Looking for more speed, Jody eventually bought a stroker kit from440source.com, and that bumped his displacement up to 496. It also propelled the car solidly into the 10s. His best pass so far is a 10.41 at 131 mph.
In addition to building horsepower, Jody's continued to improve the exterior, slowly transforming it from a ratty, primered street-racer special he describes as "high school rough," into the clean but menacing ride you see today. Along the way, he's replaced a previous owner's flared rear wheel openings with stock replacement quarter-panels and put the heavy Plymouth on a bit of a composite diet, installing a fiberglass hood, front valance, and fenders. That and gutting his door beams shaved a couple hundred pounds from the car and certainly helped his e.t.'s.
So what does the future hold for Jody's Plymouth? He tells us he'd love a supercharger or the 572 stroker kit or both, but he needs some time to save up. Whatever happens, we know this black Plymouth will show no mercy to its competition.