Here am I browsing Bring A Trailer, pointlessly scrolling cars I will not buy, when this bright yellow thing catches my eye. I take a second look at it and all I see is this chopped front end on what seems to be a race car that I can’t immediately recognize.

If you just lightly squeeze your eyes, it transforms into a perfectly square lemon. A yellow brick. It’s wrong, but it’s so right. I can’t stop staring at it and grinning.

It turns out it is indeed called the “YELLA BRICK” and it used to be a 1977 Chrysler Cordoba before someone guillotined the front bumper and dipped the rest in yellow paint.

What is a Chrysler Cordoba?

Launched in 1975, the Cordoba was only “famous” for being Chrysler’s first non-full-size car.

Chrysler wanted to join the popular niche of personal luxury vehicles. These were upmarket coupes, that appeared sportier than they were and largely focused on comfort and features, like many of the sporty trims we get today.

The Cordoba was actually successful and sold 450,000 units in the first 3 years, helping pull Chrysler out of the ditch it was headed to.

The economy changed and sales dropped. Chrysler introduced a second generation in 1980 but failed to conjure driver interest. After struggling for years, the company discontinued the model in 1983 and it was never heard of again.

Who decided to build one up into a race car?

I asked myself the same question, so I contacted the seller – Dwaine Baccus who readily agreed to an impromptu interview.

Dwaine Baccus is a third-generation mechanic and racing driver. His dad, uncle, and grandfather raced outboard motor hydroplanes in Alaska.

Dwaine grew up on motor oil, being the invaluable 3rd hand to his dad, along with his brother. In high school, they were already modifying cars and bombing the backroads of Oregon.

Some 50 years later, Dwaine Baccus still wrenches on cars. He served abroad as a mechanic for the US Army. Later, he operated repair shops, got into racing and worked his way into NASCAR.

Today he runs Team 61 Race Cars – a performance fabrication shop named after the 1961 Mercury Meteor 600 he owned for 22 years.

So what about this 1977 Cordoba race car?

The idea of “YELLA BRICK” was born in 1989. R.J Gottlieb raced his Big Red Camaro in the Silver State Classic Challenge, averaging 197.99 mph for the 90-mile stretch.

Dwaine already had the 1977 Cordoba and wanted to run in the challenge too. Unfortunately, life got in the way and it wasn’t until 2005 when he restarted the project.

The Cordoba was stripped to a bare chassis and so began Dwain’s journey to build his ultimate race care.

It took uncounted hours to restore and reinforce the body, in the process, building a full roll cage from 2-inch steel tubing.

The 400 ci V8 made at best 205 horsepower back in 1977. Dwaine took it apart, restored and overbored the block, and proceeded with stuffing Mopar performance parts

Here’s the list:

• Custom pistons by Ross Racing Pistons with a compression ratio of 12:1
• Mopar forged crankshaft from a 383 engine – turned 0.010″ under
• BHJ Dynamics harmonic damper
• Mopar Performance P4120663 Purple camshaft
• Mopar 452 cylinder heads – ported and polished
• Solid lifters and 2.14″ and 1.81″ valves
• Holley 850 cfm four-barrel carburetor
• Edelbrock Victor intake manifold
• Hooker Super Competition headers flowing into a 3″ dual exhaust with X-pipe
• Holley mechanical fuel pump
• FlowKooler water pump
• Aluminum radiator – dual push and pull electric fans
• Milodon road-racing oil pan
• Fuel Safe 24-gallon bladder fuel cell with mounted in the trunk
• Lakewood scatter shield
• McLeod clutch with a hydraulic throwout bearing

How much power does this engine make? Dwain doesn’t know either. He guestimated around 600 hp, but has never hooked it up on the dynamometer.

There’s enough juice in it to pull the car (4200 lbs) up an 8% grade at 135 mph. Unofficially, Dwaine says the Cordoba tops at 160 mph on the highway in 4th gear (0.73:1 overdrive) and 3:23 rear end.

If you run the numbers, and I did, you need about 600-700 hp to go that fast in that car. It checks out.

How aerodynamic can a brick get?

Dwaine put serious effort into sculpting these shapes out of steel. At first, the air dam looks absolutely counter-intuitive. The more you look at it, the more you start seeing the purpose behind many decisions.

Functional? Yes.

Beautiful? Eeeh..it takes some getting used to. I’m digging the lemon color and the military theme though.

It’s a 1977 Crysler Cordoba. These weren’t exactly streamlined back in the day. And Dwaine has driven enough old school Mopar to know the front end gets too light over 100mph.

In his words: “ANYTHING would be an improvement.”

So, he built the air dam to provide downforce for the front axle and ensure the car still has steering at high speed.

You don’t see it at first, but Dwaine uses the factory headlight holes as ram-air intakes. At 150 mph, the system adds 7 pounds of pressure into the airbox. Dwaine realized moving the air dam behind the line of the inlets secures a clean uninterrupted airflow, producing maximum boost.

The rest of the aero features are focused on stability, making sure the car stays in place at 150 mph:

• Dive planes on either side of the air dam
• Rocker panel side-skirts
• Roof rails, which continue over the rear window
• Rear splitter, integrated into the bumper

And of course, you can’t ever miss the foot-long, adjustable rear wing, hanging out from the rear end. It’s not the McLaren Speedtail, but it functions similarly.

It blends in with the trunk, creating a massive slope and a more streamlined shape. The airflow directed by the roof rails is allowed to gradually slow down, preventing vortices from forming close to the rear bumper and thus eliminating lift.

Positioned at the very rear, it stabilizes the rear end, like the fins of a rocket.

Racing the YELLA BRICK

The Cordoba is road legal in Idaho and comes with a clean title. That said it’s not exactly a practical daily driver.

The headlights are in the wrong place. Detachable rearview mirrors, polycarbonate windows that don’t roll down.

There’s barely any interior other than the racing seats. There are a few gauges on the dashboard and all switches are concentrated in an ammo box, mounted behind the shifter. A differential cooler is positioned behind your back and the fuel cell is in the trunk.

It’s a full-tilt race car – spartan, to say the least.  Somehow the small fan in the central console makes it all look bearable.

On its first inaugural run, Dwaine took the BRICK to the 2010 MKM Mojave Mile in and reached 137.5 mph.

In 2016, the car participated in the 2nd Central City Hillclimb, west of Denver and the PIT Rally race in Central City, Colorado. There’s a video of the latter below.

The YELLA BRICK last appeared in the 2018 World Finals at Bonneville Salt Flats, where it got teched to possibly run in the future.

So why sell it?

Dwaine says it’s the culmination of his life as a mechanic and race car driver. He loves the thing – brick shape, lemon color and all. There isn’t one thing that he regrets.

But, at 69 years old, Dwaine can no longer safely race it at the speeds it was built for. It’d be a shame to keep it in the shed and let it rot to death. He wants to pass it on to a person with racing chops, who’s going to drive it like it’s meant to.

By the time we publish this article, the Bring A Trailer auction will be over and the YELLA BRICK will have a new owner.

But you can always contact Dwaine Baccus via the Team 61 Race Cars Facebook page or his website.

You can watch the build process in the videos below: