Getting this 1939 Plymouth coupe back on the street was the father-and-son project Andy Colalillo sadly never a got the chance to do with his dad, legendary hot-rodder and customiser Mario Colalillo. Not that Mario, who passed away in 2018, had been sitting around watching the grass grow after retiring the car from drag racing duties; he was just too busy building incredible custom cars like ‘King Cad’ (SM, Sep ’03) and ‘Wild Cad’ (SM, Oct ’10), while always thinking about what he was going to create next.

First published in Street Machine’s Yearbook 2024

There’s no doubt some of that has rubbed off on Andy, who has a pretty impressive collection of cars himself and carries on the Colalillo tradition of building super-cool hot rods and customs. That legacy looks set to continue with a third generation of Colalillo, Andy’s son Will, who absolutely loves going for rides in the Plymouth now that Andy has got it clocking up the kays once more. “The car that brainwashed me as a child is now brainwashing him,” he laughs. “Getting this done for Dad, but also to have this car have the same impact on my son at a young age, was a big motivator – this build was a mission I had no option but to accept!”

When we featured the three-window Plymouth coupe in the August 2002 issue of Street Machine, it was essentially a Wild Bunch race car that Mario drove on the street. At the time, its screaming, 6/71-blown, fuel injected 377ci small-block Chev had pushed the car to a best of 9.7 seconds at a stonking 150mph, but a couple of years later, I witnessed it run a string of 9.0-second passes at Sydney Dragway as Mario desperately tried to crack into the eight-second zone.

“The car’s got a lot of history, particularly for NSW – I don’t know how many hot rods are still around that have been raced at Castlereagh,” Andy says. “Dad raced it at the opening of Eastern Creek, at WSID, at Oran Park – pretty much all the tracks in NSW. Beyond what the car is just to me, there’s a bit to the story,” says Andy.

The Plymouth was already a well-known custom before it came into Mario’s possession. It was purchased in 1957 by the then-president of the Drag-Ens Hot Rod Club, George Clark, who built it into a custom hot rod and continually updated its look. However, by the time Mario bought it in 1977, it wasn’t much more than a body and chassis sitting under a tree in Narellan.

By the late 80s, Mario had turned it into a tough, jet-black street rod rolling on Sprint rims and packing a tunnel-rammed small-block Chev, Muncie four-speed and Jag rear end. It was a pretty handy rig on the strip, too, running 13s – quick for a hot rod back then.

But Jag rear ends and drag racing tend to not get along too well, and after blowing up the diff on the strip, Mario decided to get serious, morphing the car into its famous Wild Bunch incarnation in the mid-1990s.

The form the Plymouth now takes sits somewhere in between – the car Andy remembers from his earliest childhood memories crossed with the wild, drag-racing hot rod it became. “I can remember being three or four years old and hearing that car pull up in the driveway, hassling Dad to take me for another drive in it,” Andy recalls. “The target for me was to create a blend of the two builds and make it more useable. I know, in his words, the car still scared Dad in its race version, and he didn’t want me on the street with it the way it was. Being mechanically injected on methanol, as much as it could be driven, it wasn’t practical and wouldn’t have led to a lot of regular street use, which is what I really wanted. Before, your foot was pulling the throttle back before you realised you’d even pushed it down!”

Mario and Andy had often talked about the Plymouth’s eventual street-duties comeback and had tossed around the idea of changing the engine to a naturally aspirated big-block. In the end, though, the car was renowned for its hard-hitting, blown small-block Chev, and Andy felt it was just too integral to its identity to be changed.

A lot of that wild race motor still remains. With the help of lifetime friends, John and Daniel Kuiper, Andy kept the Bowtie block (now punched out to 383 cubes) and 4340 COLA crank but swapped out the Brodix heads for a pair of AFRs. The BDS 6/71 blower also remains, although it now sits on a Weiand intake, which gets everything back under the Plymouth’s louvred bonnet. The biggest departure Andy made is the change to EFI. “I went with the dual-quad, 1000hp FiTech system for pump fuel,” he says. “It’s been on there almost 18 months, and knock on wood, I can go out in the shed, turn the key on a cold start, and in three seconds I can put it in gear and head out the driveway.”

In keeping with Andy’s desire to tone down the Plymouth’s race car look, regain some driveability and restore its hot rod DNA, he painted the rollcage black, removed the race stickers and wheelie bars, and replaced the race seats and predominantly grey interior with the original bench seat and black vinyl. The driveline and mechanicals were also updated for longer street duties. The 4.3-geared full-spool rear was swapped out for a Truetrac and 3.7 gears, the brake and fuel systems were upgraded with new gear, and a mammoth radiator and new cooling system were installed to keep the under-bonnet blown small-block at the right temperature.

But don’t worry, the Plymouth’s not exactly tame. Andy may have knocked 2-300hp out of the engine, but when you’re starting with more than 1000 horses, that’s not really an issue. This is still one seriously tough hot rod, and you can be sure it’s going to see many more kilometres under its wheels – just no longer 400m at a time.

Make no mistake: this well-loved weapon is well and truly back and ready to fire up another generation of hot rodders. But for Andy, the car’s resurrection is more personal. “For me, the history of the car is the connection to my dad,” he says. “I get in that car, put his favourite track on, Bad to the Bone, and he’s with me. There’s no two ways about it.”

ANDY COLALILLO
1939 PLYMOUTH COUPE

THANKS
John & Daniel Kuiper at Kuiper Automotive; Michael Palazzo & Rocket Industries; Sean, Kira and the OG Customs crew; Johnny Formosa; Brett at Wicked Industries; Andy Barber at Chops Garage; Pete Murphy at Get Buffed; the rest of the original Bros (Chris, Glenn and Joe) for the moral support, encouragement and help along the way; my family – especially Sian and Will; Dad – this is for you!