1968 Plymouth Valiant - Flat Bastard

This ’68 Valiant might be an illegitimate creation, but with a 700hp big-block and full road race suspension, it was a hoot to make

From the October, 2012 issue of Popular Hot Rodding

By Stephen Kim

Photography by Robert McGaffin

Failure is a beautiful thing. As crazy as that sounds, history doesn’t lie. A curious pharmacist whipped up Coke as a cure for headaches, a Kodak engineer accidently invented superglue while designing a plastic gun sight lens, and Play-Doh was originally marketed as a cleaning paste. Granted no one aspires to suck, but sometimes failure can lead to greatness. Jon Clark’s 1968 Plymouth Valiant is a perfect example. Despite packing 528 ci of aluminum big-block fury in a teeny-weeny A-Body—the smallest in fact—Jon insists that the end product is an utter failure. That’s because what was supposed to be a simple, low-buck build got out of hand with a full Pro Touring suspension, a six-speed stick, and paint that’s way too nice for a humble A-Body. While it’s understandable to be disappointed when a finished project car deviates from your original vision, in the walk of Pro Touring machines, it’s one of the best damn failures you’ll ever see.

Like most 40-somethings from Michigan, Jon’s been lusting after muscle cars his entire life. He got a job pumping gas before he could drive, and worked as a line mechanic at dealerships during his formative years. “All I’ve done since childhood is eat, sleep, and breathe cars. I love the smell of gas,” he quips. As you might expect from an A-Body owner, Jon’s mad love of Mopars runs deep, having owned oddball rides such as a Dodge A100 van and a D100 pickup. His passion for Pentastars led to a gig as the head of Mopar Performance, which he ran for 11 years before becoming an independent consultant.

During Jon’s time at Mopar Performance, he met some bad influences that ultimately culminated into the cash-sucking Valiant project. “I started hanging out with Bill Reilly from Reilly Motorsports and Matt Delaney from Delaney Auto Design, and we’ve all become good friends over the years. Bill was building a ’68 Dart with a 528 Hemi, so I thought it would be cool to build a ’68 Valiant with a 528 Wedge motor as a cousin car,” Jon explains. “Unfortunately for Bill, he didn’t know I had my eyes set on the clean six-cylinder, two-door-post Valiant sitting in the corner of his shop. I talked him into selling it to me, and he outfitted it with a complete four-link, K-member, and front suspension from the RMS catalog.”

1968 Plymouth Valiant Interior Door Panel

So far, the project was on track. “The idea was to see how badass we could make the thing while keeping the car as simple as possible, and changing as little as possible. Valiants are simple cars, so when you make them too complicated, it’s like your parents wearing leather pants,” Jon chuckles. The original plan was dropping in a late-model EFI Hemi and an overdrive trans in a good-handling package that anyone could build at home, but Jon got too power hungry. “While researching parts for my 528 build, Edelbrock released its brand-new Victor Max Wedge aluminum raised-runner cylinder heads. I fell in love with the idea of having such new technology in such an old engine platform, and that led to building the motor around an aluminum block.”

To give the big-block the bark to match its cubic inches, Jon hooked up with Ray Barton to build a max-effort wedge. The World Products aluminum block got bored to 4.500 inches, then stuffed with a 4.150-inch forged crank, billet rods, and JE forged pistons. Barton then ported the cylinder heads, and matched them up with an Edelbrock intake manifold, a custom COMP hydraulic roller cam, and a Holley EFI system. The result is a stout 700 hp in a perfectly street-friendly package. Backing up all that big-block torque is a Tremec six-speed manual trans, and a Chrysler 8.75-inch rearend fortified with Moser guts.

With an exotic all-aluminum big-block between the framerails, the Valiant had deviated profoundly from its keep-it-simple design mission. As such, the car began taking on a distinct circle track vibe. “I wanted to give the car a NASCAR-inspired road racing look, and Delaney knocked it out of the park by fabbing up a custom deck spoiler to help accomplish this,” Jon says. “The side pipes are an interesting story in themselves. I have a friend who works at Texas Motor Speedway who informed me that he had a bunch of exhaust systems laying around that were pulled off of some ARCA cars. We took some measurements and realized that they would fit the Valiant perfectly.”

Although all hopes of keeping things low-buck had gone out the window, Jon insisted on keeping the paint as low key as possible. “I was at the Detroit Auto Show one year and ran across a matte-finish AMG Mercedes-Benz SLS at the very back of the booth. I saw the flat metallic gray paint oozing across the body and went nuts,” Jon recalls. “I told Matt Delaney that I wanted to paint the Valiant the same color, but he wasn’t too thrilled about it at first. After he finished painting the car, he called me and said, ‘You would not believe how good the car looks in flat paint.’ The Valiant is supposed to be a grandma’s car, but the flat paint really brings out the incredible character lines of this body style. Since the car didn’t turn out how I originally planned, and it had flat paint, we started calling it ‘Flat Bastard.’ ”

Perhaps Jon is too harsh of a critic, but referring to the project as an illegitimate child seems rather extreme. As he explains, it’s not just about the money that went into the project, but how he corrupted his own vision for an A-Body. “I wanted this project to serve as a rallying point for the humble A-Body Mopars, and I picked the most humble of them all, a Valiant, Obviously, somewhere along the way I screwed that all up,” he laments. “I think the interior is too complicated because it has a radio. Then I decided I didn’t want to fry my innards, so I broke down and put air conditioning in it.”

Despite his disappointment, potential emulators can easily tweak certain elements of Flat Bastard and build a similar machine on a lesser budget. “People can snap up a light Dart or Valiant and go have fun using the parts in my car, or substitute the 528 with a late-model Hemi or a mild LA-series small-block while retaining the aftermarket suspension pieces,” he reasons. “Then you’d have an inexpensive, lightweight car you can have a ton of fun with on the autocross and lift the front tires with at the dragstrip. The best part is that you can build it yourself using off-the-shelf components.”

Regardless of how anyone chooses to build an A-Body, they offer practical benefits that even B- and E-Body diehards can’t deny. “I take my ’Cudas and GTXs to car shows, but I’ve been racing Darts and Demons my entire life. Of all the cars in my fleet, I drive my A-Bodies most often,” car builder Delaney explains. “Even with an iron big-block, rollcage and subframe connectors, an A-Body still only weighs 3,200 pounds. These cars are also much easier to drive through the cones on an autocross than a ’Cuda or Road Runner because they have a shorter wheelbase, and you can see the corners of the car more easily from the driver seat. Relative to the rest of the car, A-Bodies just have a much better seating position than a B- or E-Body.”

Ultimately, Jon’s dream of building a 700hp beater didn’t come to fruition and he gets a kick out of calling the Valiant a bastard. Just like an illegitimate love child, however, it proved to be a heck of a lot more fun to make than a legitimate child. As this story is being written, Jon has just returned home from a weekend of autocrossing and 600 miles of street cruising. Not surprisingly, the car performed flawlessly while turning heads in the process. That’s not too shabby at all for what he considers an utter failure.

“The great thing about this car is that you can autocross it one day, then change the shock valving and take it to the dragstrip the next day. That wasn’t even possible 10 years ago.” —Matt Delaney