Ken Riddle’s 1969 Dodge Dart Does Double Duty with Drag and Drive

Ever since he was a boy of just five years old, Ken Riddle has been filled with a love for all things Mopar. His prized possession now is a 1969 Dodge Dart known as “Enemy.” The Dart is the culmination of many painstaking hours spent in the shop building the street car to run hard at every dragstrip and to look good cruising the countless miles in between.

Growing up in the early 1970s, Riddle was inspired by his father and his father’s employees to start a life of drag racing and, ultimately, entrepreneurship of his own. The first car he ever owned was a 1968 Dodge Coronet, and that car led him to later acquire several 1968 and ’69 Darts, various Plymouth Roadrunners, Dodge Daytonas and Super Bees, and Chargers. “I always seem to go back to the body style that I have now, though,” he reminisces of the Mopars he maintained over the years.

Riddle obtained his latest 1969 Dart through a friend. “He did drag-and-drive events back in the early 2000s, and the ’69 Dart has always been a favorite,” Riddle details of what prompted the purchase. “It’s been a work in progress ever since. I’m always changing it and continuously trying to make it faster and more competitive.”

Although Riddle’s Dart has seen drag use on and off for several decades, he has only been competing in drag-and-drive competitions for the last 10 years. Originally, he ran the Dart with a generous dose of nitrous oxide onboard, then swapped it to a blower configuration before finally settling on its current turbocharged setup.

“It got its name, ‘Enemy,’ because it blew up three weekends in a row due to a tiny crack in the block that took forever to find,” laughs Riddle, who even has a custom Arizona vanity license plate to match the moniker.

Thanks to his day job – owner of Kenny’s Exhaust Works in Arizona – Riddle is more than capable with pipework and welding. He built the big tire, back-half car and handled almost every part of the process himself.

Riddle assembled the Mopar LA cast iron 360 small-block and bored it out to accommodate a displacement of 408 cubic inches. A Mopar Performance 4-inch stroker crank slings JE piston-topped Eagle H-beam connecting rods to a compression ratio of 8.5:1. The Edelbrock cylinder heads hold a plethora of parts such as 160/202 Edelbrock stainless-steel valves, Harland-Sharp rocker arms, and Edelbrock springs and retainers.

He buttoned up the bullet using ARP fasteners and capped each bank of cylinders with…