So you've been to the Woodward Dream Cruise; joined the thousands of pristine muscle cars glazed and Armor All'd to an unnatural gleam; made the 20-mph crawl all the way up the avenue and back. You've been there, done that, bought the T-shirt.

Of course you know this spectacle is the family-fun, Disney version of what went down in Detroit in the '60s and early '70s. Sure, Woodward was about convertibles and whitewalls, cruising and profiling even then. But among an elite circle, there was something else: serious street racing with serious cars for serious money. The hardcore underground met up at Howard Johnson's on Thursday nights. The players included some moonlighting factory engineers, and the scene soon escalated into something close to factory-backed street racing. For a time, one car, a '67 Plymouth owned by Jimmy Addison, ruled Woodward Avenue. Known as the Silver Bullet, it became the stuff of myth and legend, but we won't say it was never beaten. We will say seldom. Very seldom.

Jimmy Addison ran a Sunoco station at Woodward ground zero, on the east side of the street just south of Fourteen Mile.

He was also a talented wrench and a protege of Ted Spehar, Mopar's man on the inside in drag racing and the wizard behind the Motown Missile, Chrysler's moon-shot Pro Stock project. Around 1969, Chrysler engineering had an old test mule left over from the performance parts program, a blue '67 GTX with a 440 engine and a column-shift automatic. Through Chrysler executive Tom Hoover, Spehar arranged for the GTX to be obtained by Addison, who painted it silver and dropped in a '68 426 Hemi.

But there was more to the Bullet than that, and more than met the eye: Addison slipped in a half-inch-stroked crankshaft, increasing the displacement to 487 cubic inches. With that big arm and all the trick engine pieces passed from Chrysler's back door to Addison's shop, the Bullet probably made more than 700 horsepower. The car also was lighter than anyone knew. A Mopar B-body with the big Hemi and Torqueflite transmission normally weighs 3900 pounds, but Addison subtly gutted the car, then fitted fiberglass fenders, doors, hood and decklid. And unlike production street Hemis, the engine was equipped with aluminum heads and a rare magnesium intake manifold. Ready to kick some behind, the Bullet weighed only 3200 pounds.

Not that Addison's Plymouth was a sleeper.

With 12-inch slicks stuffed under its trademark bulging rear quarter-panels, the Bullet didn't sneak up on anybody. Nor did it take long for word to get out that the car ran the quarter-mile in the low-10-second range at more than 132 mph. Adding to its mystique was its weird, pneumatic exhaust note: Addison installed four huge '68 Cadillac mufflers, so at idle at least the Bullet sounded not like a race car but some berserk air compressor.

Addison quickly ran out of competition to slap around. The Bullet was sold in 1975 and languished in the garage of one semi-enthusiastic owner, then another. The Motor City fell on hard times for a while, and the original Woodward scene faded. But one guy kept track of the Bullet through the years. As a kid, Harold Sullivan, anoth-er Woodward irregular and GTX owner, used to lurk at Addison's Sunoco and stare at the car.

"Then Jimmy would come over and run me off," Sullivan laughs. "I never dreamed that one day I would own this car."

Sullivan became a dedicated Mopar muscle car collector, always keeping one eye on the whereabouts of the Bullet, and in 1994 he finally grabbed the infamous racer in a swap for a Plymouth Superbird. Sullivan has adoringly restored the Bullet to a finish the street fighter hardly knew in its heyday. We'd heard the car was back in circulation, then spotted it at a recent display, agleam in Armor All. Was this really the car, the original Silver Bullet?

"That's the first thing people ask me," Sullivan says. "The people who knew the car and saw it run, they never forget."

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