Print edition: 
Jeff Stephenson isn’t just a "MoPar man," he’s a devoted Dodge guy.
"I’ve just been into Dodges forever,” he says. “I know them well enough I can put them together with my eyes closed."
But one look at the latest in his long line of Dodge muscle car restorations shows it was done with both eyes wide open. It is a "Vitamin C Orange" Dodge Charger Daytona with the big wing out back and the extended shark-like nose up front, a design created to make Dodges run over 200 mph on the high-banked NASCAR tracks of the late 1960s and early ’70s.
A closer look, however, reveals this Dodge Daytona isn’t one of the 505 racing models manufactured in 1969, but a 1973 Charger.
NASCAR outlawed the high-winged Dodge Daytonas and their sister cars, the Plymouth Superbirds, in 1970.
Stephenson would have preferred the real deal, but he knew he could never afford one of those rare machines. "They are way over $100,000, if you can find them," he said.
So he decided to build a version of his own, after finding a plain-vanilla ’73 Dodge Charger that he says probably should have been routed to a car crusher in a salvage yard. "It really was a basket case," he said of the rusty hulk that he bought for $400 about three years ago.
He knew right away that it wouldn’t make sense to sink a lot of money into a pure stock restoration.
"There was nothing special about this car … it was a 400 (cubic inch) big block. It was never going to be worth anything if I turned it back into a plain Charger," he said.
So he bolted the body shell onto his homemade rotisserie and went to work, cutting out the rusted sheet metal and replacing it with fresh steel.
"I did all the body work myself. I’m an impatient person … I was surprised it came out as well as it did," Stephenson said.
It wasn’t merely a matter of patching in fresh pieces. He had to create whole new pieces to get the right look, from the twin scallops he cut into the long hood, to the sculptured indentations on the door skins. He did use a set of Super Bee side scoops to replicate the rear brake vents.
But the biggest challenge was the massive aerodynamic front end assembly, built without the aid of blueprints, drawings or fiberglass.
"I built the nose out of cardboard first. I cut the front of the car off and then made it out of sheet metal. There are a lot of hours — a ton of hours in that nose," Stephenson said. The fold-away headlights were borrowed from a Pontiac TransAm.
He initially decided to go with a smaller rear deck spoiler.
"But everybody said, `If you’re going to have a Daytona, you’ve got to have that big wing,’ ” he said. So he built the iconic tall wing out of metal, again without the use of factory drawings. It can be removed for everyday cruising or installed quickly for car shows.
When the body was ready for paint, Stephenson called in a friend’s father, Troy Hager, to shoot the car in that eye-searing orange right there inside his garage.
Stephenson built the 440 cubic inch V-8 power plant himself, using a factory high performance cam, intake and exhaust manifolds and routing air to the twin snorkel air cleaner through a pair of metal ducts.
He figures the engine produces about 400 horsepower. Using a Chrysler 727 automatic transmission with a B&M shift kit and a 2.92 gear in the 8-3/4-inch Chrysler rear end, his Daytona has serious highway cruising potential.
Police-issue wheels and button hubcaps and a set of BFG 245x60x14 radials complete the rolling stock.
Still, Stephenson says, "It’s more show than go. It’s a big, heavy car."
When it came to the rat-ravaged interior, there was just no saving it.
Since he wasn’t building a "clone" or a detail-for-detail correct copy of a Dodge Daytona, but a "phantom" version of a car that never existed before, he opted for comfort. A complete set of Cadillac Northstar leather seats was transplanted into the Dodge, and they look right at home there.
"People love this car. It’s a real head-turner," Stephenson says with justified pride. "It’s one-of-a-kind. You’ll probably never see another one like it."
