This is a shocking moment for me and for the diehard readers who recall this car and have asked for 11 years-with varying levels of deference or derision-if I will ever finish it. After all, it was my first car, I've now owned it for exactly 27 years, and in the '90s it was a HOT ROD magazine project that got stuffed with a Dick Landy 484ci Hemi. Why would I abandon it?

There was a time when I drove this car everywhere, starting when I bought it for $1,800-and it only had 82,000 miles on the clock-on April 15, 1983, before I even had a driver's license. I was 15 years old. Effie, my paternal grandmother, promised to buy me a Honda ATC if I was able to maintain good grades in high school (after I'd been invited to no longer attend the private school I'd been in since kindergarten). I did, and managed to parlay the purchase into a car instead of a dirt toy-a car that would have horrified Effie had she seen it. I spent many days with my father driving to look at potential buys; I recall having investigated a Challenger T/A that was too expensive at $3,500, a Hemi 'Cuda with a 440 in it and the Shaker scoop bonded to the top side of the hood, and a Plum Crazy '70 340 Dart. I'd limited my choices to Mopars. I think that's because I had a friend who let me drive his '71 Duster Twister when I was 14, and because I was already a collector of old car magazines and was rapt when I saw those outrageous graphics on the cars and in those crazy ads for the Scat Pack and the Rapid Transit System. Mopars just had character. And I ended up buying what's arguably the ugliest Mopar muscle car ever, a '70 Dodge Super Bee. It has a face you grow to love.

I sure did. I waxed that thing every single weekend for at least three years and wrenched on it nearly as often. It came to me with a 383 Magnum, a 727 TorqueFlite, and an 83/4 rear with 3.23 gears and a one-legger. The first thing I ever bought for it was a Mr. Gasket spun-aluminum velocity stack. It would not fit under the hood, but I put it on when the hood was open. It was perfect with the rest of the '80s-style dress, but I got over it pretty quickly, turning my attentions to prowling the junkyards for speed parts. Those were the days when Holleys, aluminum intakes, and muscle cars were still at the Pick Your Part. The Recycler was a local free-ad publication (now just a website) I'd scour weekly, line by line, to find what I needed for cheap. That's where I got a rearend pig with 4.10 gears. I drove the car for years, buzzing 3,500 rpm at 65 mph, and never thought twice about it. I broke the Bee often, and my father would always come get me with a station wagon and a chain to tow it home. I bet we dragged it 100 miles that way.

In 1984, I rebuilt the 383 in high school auto shop using the dingle-ball-hone method. Instructor Mr. Quentin Swan, who as a Glendale reserve PD officer had knocked my head for driving without a license, recommended an old-school place that reground my cam to 3/4 race specs. I had finished getting the engine installed, but not running yet, and headed for home as a pedestrian when I was hit by a VW Rabbit. I spent 11 days in the hospital getting a titanium plate screwed to my left humerus, but my buddies ganged up to get the car finished and running by the time I made it home. That was very cool.

When I was between 11th and 12th grades, the Super Bee ended up in a TV after-school special that was the first thing directed by Henry Winkler. My father had oddly become the show's car coordinator (he was in the production end of the business when I was growing up), and several of my friends' cars were in it. The story was a message against drinking and driving depicting hero swimmer Scott Baio excitedly buying my Super Bee from used car salesman Danny DeVito and then, predictably, wrecking it. During the filming, a guy named Tommy Swerdlow, making his acting debut, ran my car into a pole. That was a horrible day for me. Not only was my car smashed in the nose, but The Fonz shut me up for complaining too much about the actors driving around with the water falling out of the radiator. "Look, kid, I'll buy you a new $%^#in' motor," he said.

He did buy me a new $%^#in' paintjob. I parted out one of the stunt cars to fix the damage, and the paintjob was done in a Glendale, California, shop then owned by a guy named Dwayne McKinney. He was no one to me at the time, but I now know him as a longtime Bonneville racer.

I was 18, fresh out of high school, and working parts delivery for Burbank Dodge, when I used my powers of scrounging to build a 440 for the Bee (I remember buying a Street Dominator intake for $50 out of a guy's trunk at the street races one night). Every dime of every paycheck went into the big-block as I followed a buildup recipe from Car Craft. I felt pride that the odometer turned 100,000 miles during the 440's first huge burnout. It never went quicker than 13.30s on motor at the 2,900-foot elevation of the now-defunct Los Angeles County Raceway. In retrospect, that was piggy. I don't know how quick it was on nitrous, but I sprayed a bunch of bottles through it.

As happens far too often, the project was stillborn. Landy was never really thrilled with how quick the car was, and neither was I. It bested a 10.60 at 128 mph at Famoso Raceway in Bakersfield, but it needed more work than I could afford. It sat until 1999, by which time I was the editor of Car Craft. I dragged out the car for a revamp in that magazine and penned a story called "Pros and Cons of a 10-Second Street Car" in the Nov. '99 issue. The story resonated with many readers who may have been in the same situation after the Fastest Street Car craze of the '90s: My car was too radical to be a street car and too slow to be a race car.

In that time, I've been sincerely humbled and not just a little surprised by how many readers have asked me to resurrect the car. It's very odd to be out somewhere and have a complete stranger say, "Bring back the Super Bee!" A few months ago, I revealed to Rob Kinnan the real reason I'd never done it: I just wasn't interested in it. I may have never said that out loud until then. Over the past year, Rob has told me a bunch of times, "You really need to do the Super Bee." But, yeah, I simply didn't care.

So why now? Honest truth: desperation. We had a cover story planned for this issue that didn't work out, and we needed a solution in the very last days before press time. We wanted to do a barn finds cover story, and I mentioned that I had a great photo of the Bee looking totally derelict in the garage where it had been for a decade-plus. That photo solved one problem, but we needed a story to go with it. You're reading that story right now. Rob sort of rammed me into it: "You're never going to fix that car unless you have to. This is a good reason to have to. Just do it."

So we did. Two weeks shy of my 27th anniversary with the Bee, we pumped up the tires, blew off the dust, dragged it to my house, and I touched it with a wrench for the first time since 1996.

I'm conflicted about the plan for the car, as I have been anytime I've thought about it in recent history. Do I go all out and make it faster or tame it down so I can actually use it? In the end, I'm going for the latter, plus adding a nitrous shot to make sure it's still quick. This car was built in the days when a 10-second street car was still considered pretty serious and when there was a lot of overkill to get there-like, in this case, a 41/2-inch exhaust, 5.13 Pro gears, and a rocket science fuel system. It also has some antiquated stuff, like an ancient-grind cam, a pinion snubber-based rear suspension, some unnecessary front suspension tweaks, and an intake manifold that was a compromise even when new. We'll be able to improve all that stuff and probably still run mid-10s but not hate driving it to a cruise night. The process will start next month with dyno testing and parts swapping on the 484ci Hemi. Meanwhile, I'm thrashing to fix all the other items that have deteriorated due to neglect or that were never really right in the first place.

The best part is, now that I've spent a few days handling it, sitting in it, cleaning it up, wrenching on it, and dreaming about the possibilities, I'm stoked to get it going. As odd as it may seem for me to say this considering the job I hold, I'm a little choked up at seeing the Super Bee on the cover of HOT ROD. That's still a landmark to me. This is also the first time a photo of mine has run as the magazine's main cover image.

Thanks to you who've nagged me for this over the years and thanks to Kinnan for forcing me into it. It's time to get this done.

Magazine Coverage

In truth, the Super Bee has not had much ink in the magazines, and what was done was in black and white. Here's a guide to the stories where the car has been seen in the past:

MAGAZINE ISSUE DESCRIPTION HOT ROD Apr. '93 Mopar B-Body guide HOT ROD Dec. '95 Hemi buildup part one HOT ROD Jan. '96 Hemi buildup part two HOT ROD May '96 Chassis buildup Car Craft Nov. '99 "Pros and Cons of a 10-Second Street Car" Show All