Quote:
Originally Posted by ss wannabee
M68,
The black car in #79...(#1609-SS/A)...might be Centolanza..BUT it looks an
AWFUL lot like George Baptiste's car..out of the NY area....
Think he's had it a long time...and I saw it run just a few years back...is he still
running it?
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It does look like George's car but it's not. Yes, he has had it a long time. I spoke with him circa 1991 at Mopars at Englistown show and he told me (and a buddy of mine) he was in the process of building a SS/A Barracuda. It's a damn shame he decided to modify an uncut original car. It was so original that Chrysler (Chrysler Historical Society?) wanted to buy it from him but he declined. Bad move, in my opinion, for Chrysler would'be paid top dollar for the car and with that money George could've built a clone and bought
several Ray Barton Hemi engines for what he would have gotten money-wise from the sale. More important than that, an uncut original car, a rare piece of automotive history, would've been preserved.
Here's a photo I took of George in the pits at Raceway Park in the mid-1990s along with similar comments in a post I made in the Hemi Dart thread back in 2009:
http://www.classracer.com/classforum...4&postcount=89
Quote:
Originally Posted by mopar68
George Baptiste bought an original UNCUT '68 Hurst Hemi Barracuda from some street racer-type who ran afoul of the law and (unfortunately) cut it up into a race car back in the very early 1990s.
The car was purchased from someone in the northern New Jersey area. It saw very limited strip action (and possibly street?) and sat for years until George found out about it and purchased it sometime in the 1980s. From what I was told, the 'Cuda was so original Chrysler Corp. offered to purchase the car back but George declined.
I am only relating what I was told about 18 years ago and cannot verify this story's accuracy.
Btw, is George still around? I'd like to hear the story from him!
M68 |
I haven't seen or spoke to George since the 1990s. I have no idea if he's still racing or not.
M68