Captain Robert Frost pilots everything from a 747 to a really cool
’68 572 Hemi Charger.
By Al Dente Photos by TheBruntBros
yellow car. Ray Barton, who built the 572 Hemi, and Pat Condon, Robert’s chassis man, say they would be shocked if the
Charger didn’t run in the high 9s. Guess the pressure is on Robert.
When he’s not mending the wall with his
neighbor (“good fences make good
neighbors” and all that), Robert Frost
can be found in the captain’s seat piloting
international flights for a major airline. Because
the FAA clamped down some time ago on stewardesses
lap dancing in the cockpit, Robert whiles away
the endless hours while on autopilot by penning a few
verses and thinking about Mopars.
One of the things Robert thinks about is how
to get one of his several Mopes into Mopar Action
magazine—a better chance than getting his poetry
published here. He’s even offered to fly us free
(baggage class) to the Zagat restaurant tour of
Mogadishu. Now that’s an offer no one, us included,
can refuse. The problem is Robert can’t actually
land in Mogadishu, so we would have to parachute
into a drop zone with our knife, fork, napkin and
Grey Poupon. Course, we’d be on our own as far
as getting home. So, on second thought, we sent
TheBruntBros instead with instructions to set up a
Mopar Action satellite office to handle subscriptions
for our mag and the new Harris Pub & Co. flagship
megahit, “Today’s Cat Juggler.”
As we don’t renege on our promises (the Brunts are
in Somalia as we speak), we’re featuring Robert’s ’68
Charger. Actually, we might have featured it without the
Mogadishu perk. We told Robert we could slip his car
into the pages only if it was yellow because we had an
opening for a yellow car (next issue it’ll be for a red car).
After a quick call to his painter, Robert said “no problem.”
So here it is.
Robert’s other Mopes are ’69, ’70 and ’71 vintage,
and he’s working to build a “straight” (as in poker). So
when this ’68 Charger R/T turned up he went for the deal
(get it?) The Dodge was green, but Mopar Action didn’t
have an opening for a green car until mid-2014. Robert’s
aim was to turn the stock Charger into a “triple threat”
machine—show, cruise and race. If he didn’t have jumbo
jets to ferry him around, Robert probably would have
engineered a set of wings for the Charger and turned it
into a quadruple threat machine. But that’s neither here
nor there.
The first stop was the dragstrip where the
440-powered B-body turned a 15.2. That’s up at altitude
