A RARE 1969 ROAD RUNNER SIX-BARREL IS REUNITED WITH ITS ORIGINAL OWNER’S FAMILY

In the world of muscle car lore, there are stories, and then there are damn good stories. The following is one of the latter and goes something like this: Dave Smith of Spokane, Washington, was 5 years old when he went with his parents, Dave and Diane Wolfe, to pick up the new 1969 Plymouth Road Runner that was optioned with the A12 440-6BBL package they had ordered through Tekoa Motors. Over the next several years Dave rode all over Spokane in the daily-driven world-beater Mopar, watched his dad race it at Deer Park Raceway, and observed his dad install a beefier cam, headers, and 4.56 rear gears, monitored with the installation of a Sun tachometer.  

Then, in 1974, his dad sold the car. Disappointing as it was, a course was set for Dave, who’s been a consummate Mopar man ever since. Nearly 25 years after the sale of the car, Dave and his dad began searching for it in hopes of bringing it back home. Regrettably, Dave Sr. died in 2001, heightening Dave’s desire to find the family heirloom.  

Of course, one of the first steps in the effort to recover the storied Road Runner was to contact the person who Dave Sr. had sold the car to in 1974. That was Wayne Hanson, who still lives in the Spokane area. Wayne owned the A12 for roughly ten years and ended up turning it into more of a street machine, with a new white paint job applied over the original Frost Green, and a full diamond-tuck upholstered interior.  

In fact, father and son had viewed the A12 in 1984 when Wayne had it for sale, but the young Dave didn’t have the funds and Dave Sr. wasn’t enamored with the fancy custom interior. Wayne ended up selling the Road Runner to a fellow in British Columbia, Canada, and that’s all Dave and Dave Sr. knew when they began looking in earnest during the late 1990s.  

“This was in the infancy of the internet” Dave explains, “and so it really wasn’t of much use to us at the time.” Instead, Dave put his sleuthing skills to work, talking to local Mopar nuts who knew their Canadian counterparts quite well. “A couple of these guys mentioned they knew of a fellow in B.C. named Simon Bach, who had raced a white ’69 Road Runner A12 that could possibly be the same car. Unfortunately, by this time, they knew Simon had sold the car and since passed, and the Road Runner had seemingly vanished.”  

No more information was forthcoming over the years, but in 2010 Dave had a bit of a breakthrough when he discovered the A12 Registry on a now-vibrant internet. “I joined the registry and began posting in the ‘lost and found’ section” Dave says. “Of course, everyone was super interested and wanted to help, and yet nobody knew of the car. Fortunately, I scored big when talking to Wayne years earlier because he gave me a picture of the original window sticker, which noted the VIN of the car. That was obviously a key piece of information I had throughout the search, and I had previously tried to use it in data searches through some insurance and law enforcement contacts I had.”  

As the years passed, Dave became disillusioned about the chances of ever finding his dad’s long-lost Plymouth. He continued to post on the A12 forums and continued to come up empty. By this time, Dave was in his mid-50s, and had come to the point of thinking that building a clone might be the best way to relive his youthful memories.  

So, in 2019, Dave responded to an ad in Spokane for an Omaha Orange ’69 Road Runner hardtop that seemed like a great starting point. Even better, it turns out that when Dave Sr. sold his A12 in 1974, he kept the unique Six-Barrel manifold and carbs. Months earlier he’d installed a single four-barrel Edelbrock STR-14-45 intake and Holley Dominator carb in search of better ETs, and the Six-Barrel setup remained in his garage. Soon after the Road Runner was sold, Dave Sr. sold the intake and carbs to his good friend Ken Hill, who ran it for a time on his ’69 Charger R/T.  

Ken later removed the induction and, after Dave Sr. passed away, gave the setup to Dave as a touchstone to his dad. In Dave’s mind, the original induction would be an awesome centerpiece to his clone inclination, and thus the project was launched with the newly bought orange ’69.  

“My friend Randy Ingraham and I stripped the orange car to bare metal and had the body ready for paint by 2020. I had even applied the proper Frost Green paint on the bottom side of the car when my world sort of turned upside down,” Dave recounts. His new project was well under way, but things were about to get interesting.  

“Dave Carson from the A12 Registry called one late evening in November 2020, saying he’d just seen an A12 Road Runner project car for sale in Manitoba on a Canadian buy/sell website. From the description, he was quite sure it was my dad’s old car. Of course, I immediately looked at the website and was thrilled to see it. I just knew it was the car, though it was basically in pieces, with fresh paint in the original Lime Frost. It was already late here on the West Coast, meaning it was quite late in Manitoba, but I called at once and connected with the owner, Frank Safonous. We confirmed it to be my dad’s car, and I arranged the purchase right then and there. Frank was great and filled me in on everything he knew.” 

Frank explained to Dave that he’d bought the car around 1996 from an owner in Manitoba, who’d owned it only a brief time after buying it from someone in Edmonton, Alberta. The Road Runner was still white with diamond-tuck interior at that time, and Frank enjoyed the car until he decided to disassemble it and start a restoration in 2001. Dave would later come to understand that the Edmonton owner had indeed bought it from Simon Bach in British Columbia, so the ownership chain in Canada included the Bach purchase from Wayne Hanson in 1984, and two unknown owners prior to Frank’s purchase in 1996. When Dave brought the car home to Spokane in December of 2020, he had become the A12’s seventh owner.  

The transaction proved difficult from the point of view that the world was in the grips of the COVID pandemic in 2020, not to mention that the car was in pieces a thousand miles away. Frank had indeed started the restoration of the A12 but was far from finished. He’d only recently had the car painted, and that had involved complete disassembly.  

“Frank was really helpful,” Dave says. “He went ahead and loosely assembled the car for transport and boxed up the rest of the parts. Anything that wasn’t installed on the car had to be declared to customs on a manifest, along with the value of each item, and the list was lengthy.” Coincidentally, the owner of the trucking company that brought the car to Spokane was a fellow A12 owner, and went out of his way to assure the process was as smooth as possible.  

When his dad’s A12 arrived in Spokane, it was an incredible reunion. “I hadn’t laid eyes on it for 37 years and hadn’t felt the feeling of it being ‘ours’ for 47 years.” A string of admirers soon came by, including both Dave’s mother and stepmom, who both spent considerable time behind the wheel. Additionally, Dave Sr.’s friends Ken Hill and John Vandervert were thrilled to see their old friend’s ride, which they remember almost like yesterday. “I’ve got a ton of memories in that car” John says. “Dave was my best friend, and I miss him to this day. Seeing the car with Davey, and the work he’s done to bring it back to its prime, is incredible.”  

“I’d have bought the car even if it had been a basket case,” Dave states. Fortunately, it wasn’t; in fact it was remarkably well preserved, considering passing through several owners through the years, not all of whom were interested in its preservation. As an example, an unknown prior owner had converted the original transmission into a “clutch-flite” [A modified TorqueFlite using a clutch in place of the torque converter for drag racing -ed.], ruining the original 727 Torqueflite for future street and restoration use. On the upside, all the original body panels were in place, as was the original 440.  

On close examination however, Dave decided to repaint the car due to imperfections he wasn’t satisfied with in the recent paint job. “I had Russ Freund block-sand it down into the basecoat green, and then respray the green and clearcoat. I also repaired some previous damage in the engine compartment—the firewall pinch-weld had been bent up and I closed up the holes in the firewall where the clutch assembly had been installed. As a result, I had Russ re-shoot the engine compartment too.”  

Surprisingly, the original engine had never been over-bored, but during the rebuild by Gibson Performance in Spokane, the block was punched .030-inch. The rebuild was mostly to stock A12 specs, but Dave deviated with a Bob Karakashian-spec hydraulic cam. Of course, the crowning touch was re-uniting the 440 with its original intake and carbs, so graciously provided years earlier by Ken Hill. Bill Overcash is credited with refreshing the three Holley two barrels, and the resulting cam/carb combo has the 440 running and sounding better than ever, the spent gases now exiting through an Accurate reproduction exhaust system.  

More goodness is found in the taxicab spartan interior, where a Legendary upholstery kit and headliner look for all the world like the originals. Those door panels and dash pad are original, while both Instrument Specialties and Redline Gauge Works were tapped to restore and re-plate the dash components and gauges. The Sun ST-602 hanging under the dash is the actual unit Dave remembers helping his dad install when he was a youngster. Man, the memories here!  

Dave’s exacting standards were borne out at the first event he attended with the A12 in 2022—the Spokane Speed and Custom show. This is where we stumbled onto the F3 Frost Green Road Runner in all its glory, displayed in the same area as the now-restored Omaha Orange 383 car Dave intended to turn into the clone of his father’s fabled ride.  

“I ended up selling the orange car to Randy’s dad, who finished it up per its original specs. There’s nothing better than displaying the cars together and recounting the history that has taken place since the car was delivered in 1969. It’s a pretty special story if I do say so myself,” Dave proudly states. We must agree. A premium restoration on a rare and legendary muscle Mopar? A long lost and found original family owner history? Yes indeed, the story of Dave Smith’s ’69 A12 Road Runner is pretty damn good!  

OWNER’S VIEW 

I was between 5 and 10 years old when my parents owned this car, which was a period in my life that I would describe as perfect. I didn’t have a care in the world, and all was good. I rode around in the coolest car in Spokane, went to the races, my dad and mom were married, I had good friends, and so on. Well, we all know life isn’t perfect, and as I got older, I quickly came to that realization. When my dad passed in 2001, my interest in recovering and restoring this car was greater than ever. Not only is it a connection to my dad, but a connection to a very good time of my life. Finding this car was literally a dream come true, and I’d like to thank the many people who were involved in making it happen. Dave Carson and the rest of the A12 Registry gang, you’re the best!  —Dave Smith 

SPECIFICATIONS1969 ½ PLYMOUTH ROAD RUNNER 440-6  

PRICE 

Base price: $3,083.00  

Price as profiled: $3,697.35  

Options on car profiled…………A12 440 Six-Barrel package ($462.80); automatic transmission ($39.30); 3-speed wipers ($5.40); undercoating ($16.60); AM radio ($61.55); Police Handling Package ($28.70) 

ENGINE  

Type: Chrysler RB-series OHV V-8, cast-iron block

Cylinder heads: Chrysler cast iron #2843906, 2.08/1.74-in. valves 

Displacement: 440 cu.in. 

Bore x stroke: 4.32 x 3.75 inches 

Compression ratio: 10.5:1 

Horsepower @ rpm: 390 @ 4,700 

Torque @ rpm: 490 lb-ft @ 3,200 

Valvetrain: Hydraulic, flat-tappet camshaft; shaft-mount rocker arms 

Induction system: Chrysler/Edelbrock aluminum intake manifold, three Holley 2300 two-barrels (350-cfm center, 500-cfm outboards) 

Lubrication system: External gear-type pump, full pressure 

Ignition system: Chrysler Prestolite dual breaker-point distributor 

Electrical system: 12-volt  

Exhaust system: High-flow cast-iron manifolds, dual exhaust 

TRANSMISSION  

Type: Chrysler 727 TorqueFlite three-speed automatic 

Ratios: 1st/ 2.45:1 … 2nd/1.45:1 … 3rd/1.00:1 … Reverse/2.21:1 

DIFFERENTIAL  

Type: Dana 60 with Sure-Grip differential  

Ratio: 4.10:1 

STEERING  

Type: Recirculating ball, manual 

Ratio: 22:1 

BRAKES  

Type: Hydraulic, manual four-wheel drums 

Front: 11 x 3.0-in drum 

Rear: 11 x 2.50-in drum 

SUSPENSION  

Front: Independent, unequal length control arms, torsion bars, tubular shocks, anti-sway bar 

Rear: Semi-elliptic leaf springs, tubular shocks 

WHEELS & TIRES  

Wheels: Chrysler stamped steel 

Front/rear: 15 x 6 in 

Tires: Goodyear bias-ply redline (Currently Firestone G70-15 radial redline) 

Front/rear: G70-15 

PRODUCTION  

A total of 1,412 A12 Road Runners were built in 1969.  All were built in the Lynch Road assembly plant during the months of April, May, and June 1969. Body style and transmission breakdown are as follows (data courtesy of the A12registry.)  

Four-speed Automatic  

Road Runner hardtop: 422 375  

Road Runner coupe: 388 227  

PERFORMANCE  

¼ mile: 12.91 sec @ 111.80 mph* 

*From the June 1969 issue of Super Stock and Drag Illustrated, Ronnie Sox driving a Road Runner with four-speed, slightly tweaked carburetors, and no air cleaner  

     

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2025-02-01T14:03:09Z