To some, this would appear to be a run of the mill 1974 Plymouth Barracuda with a super clean body that’s ready for paint. However, if you look closer, you may notice something different about this particular Barracuda. On the sides of the car, the panels are covered in strange grids and markings. The question is, why?

This body is actually the original tooling proof used by Plymouth when they designed and produced the Barracuda. There are markings every five inches horizontally and vertically, including the engineers hand writing on the car! While most of these bodies were destroyed by Chrysler after their usefulness ran out, this one somehow escaped the crusher!  Story goes that it was shipped to Dick Landy to be used as a drag car. Dick sent the body out to be acid dipped (typical for race car bodies) but ended up deciding to use a Dart instead so the Barracuda never met the dipper, thus preserving the markings.

The Barracuda plan was scrapped and ended up sitting in the corner of a shop. A year or so later, it’s said a Chrysler employee was looking for a car to build so he purchased this one and started putting it together. As usual with a lot of project cars, life got in the way causing the project to become dead in the water so he ended up selling the car to a friend. The new owner stuffed it away and didn’t do very much with it until it came up for sale a while back.

It went to auction through Mecum back in 2011 where it did not meet reserve at $20,000. After that, it went up for sale on eBay however bids only went up to $9,600 (way under reserve price) so it didn’t sell. It appears to be currently for sale on a website for $31,995. We here at Mopar Connection believe that this unique Barracuda is a piece of Mopar and ‘Cuda history and should go into a museum or collection like Tim Wellborn’s.