Harley’s Tale

In the vast expanse of Texas Motor Speedway, Rochelle Hunter stands beside “Harley,” her meticulously modified 2018 Dodge Charger 392 Scat Pack. With carbon fiber accents gleaming under the lights and custom Lamborghini-style doors that open with surprising ease, this isn’t just transportation – it’s a rolling testament to her mechanical expertise and unwavering vision.

“I am a diesel mechanic. Cummins is the name of my game, and I’ve always been a fan of Mopar_®,” Rochelle explains, her pride evident as she runs her hand along the vehicle’s sleek lines. Having previously built a 1968 Plymouth Valiant drag car from “an empty rolling shell that was going to the scrapyard,” she initially intended for the Charger to serve a more practical purpose.

“I’m not the soccer mom type with the van,” she admits with a laugh. “I have three kids, so I needed four doors. I went to the dealership, found Harley, fell in love with her, and said, ‘You have a car to have fun with. You’re going to leave this alone because this is how you carry the kids to school.'” That promise lasted approximately 48 hours.

“I left it at the dealership for them to do the ceramic coating, and by the time Harley got home two days later, I already had the wicker bill. I already had a front lip.” From there, the modifications snowballed: exhaust first (“because we had to be loud”), then carbon fiber everything, custom lighting, airbags and the striking Lamborghini-style doors.

Despite California’s strict emissions laws limiting engine modifications, Rochelle has transformed virtually every other aspect of the vehicle. She takes the words “Built, not Bought” to heart, having performed most of the work herself, drawing on skills she’s been developing since childhood in rural Washington State. “I grew up in the sticks up in Washington. That’s all we do up there – we build trucks, we go wheeling, we build cars, we go racing. I built my first engine by the time I was 12,” she notes.

It is tough to pick the standout feature on Harley. One mod flows into the next seamlessly. The sum of every part adds so much to the whole it is easy to miss some of the finer details. If I had to choose one feature that detached my jaw and landed it on the floor, the custom headliner, which Richmond painstakingly created by installing 850 individual fiber optic strands is hard for me to wrap my brain around. “You have to take the headliner out, poke 850 holes, feed 850 fibers, glue 850 fibers, push it back up,” she explains of the 12-hour process. “I fed it back through the C-pillar and then hid it in the wheel well so you don’t see the fiber optics or the big box. Then you have to snip 850 tiny strands of fiber optics right at the headliner.” When asked about her patience during such a tedious installation, Rochelle laughs. “There was a lot of yelling,” she admits.

The road to creating a show car is rarely smooth – a major issue was discovered just days before bringing Harley to Texas Motor Speedway. After meticulously painting interior pieces and engine bay components with a custom red flake finish, disaster struck during the clear coat application.

“Everything wrinkled. The mixture wasn’t right,” Rochelle recalls, raw emotion still evident in her voice. “I literally cried. I sat on the floor. I told Eric, ‘I’m not going, you’re going to Texas without me.'”

Rather than admit total defeat, she stayed up until 4 a.m., sanding everything down to start over. When the weather turned cold and rainy the next day – terrible conditions for painting – she improvised a solution that showcased the creative problem-solving that defines great builders. “I’m at Walmart looking at the sports section, and they had a kids’ teepee camping tent,” she says. “It’s tall enough for me to stand in and hang my parts. I put my heater in the tent in the garage, re-hung and repainted everything.”

The rush to complete the work before departure meant applying the second coat of clear the night before leaving, placing the still-curing parts in boxes for the journey and installing them upon arrival.

Perhaps the most challenging test of Rochelle’s commitment to Harley came earlier when a driver ran a stop sign and T-boned the passenger side of her beloved Charger. With extensive damage to the pillars and side panels, the words “Total Loss” were possible.

“I called the body shop, and I said, ‘Listen, I don’t care what you have to do, what you have to say, what I gotta pay. If this car is gone, I will never mentally recover,'” she recounts. When the shop suggested she could simply replace the vehicle with insurance money, Rochelle’s response revealed the deep emotional connection many enthusiasts develop with their projects.

“You cannot replace this car and the memories that I’ve made and the time and everything,” she told them. “Our cars are not just our cars. This is 200 therapy sessions. This is seeing a shrink. This is going on a drive. This is not replaceable.”

Fortunately, the Charger was repaired rather than totaled, allowing her to continue the journey with Harley – a journey that, like most passion projects, balances moments of frustration with the incomparable satisfaction of creating something uniquely personal.

Today, Harley is still her daily driver. The Charger is a testament to Rochelle’s philosophy that vehicles should be extraordinary and functional – a philosophy that makes perfect sense to those who understand that cars can be so much more than mere transportation.