From Power Wheels to Badassador: The Bandito345 Story

The phone lights up at 6 AM. Another message. Another person who saw the car at a light, at a gas station, on the highway. For Sal Cordova, this has become routine. The 40-year-old Texas-based builder has spent the last six years transforming a bone-stock 2009 Dodge Challenger RT into Bandito345 – a widebody, turbocharged showpiece that stops traffic and social media feeds.

But rewind three decades, and you’ll find a six-year-old kid in a Chicago backyard, terrorizing the grass in a battery-powered toy car.

“That was my first real experience with a car,” Cordova recalls. “My parents had this really big backyard, and I got this little two-seater electric car for Christmas. I’d charge that thing up and just cruise around for hours. I was hooked from that moment on.”

His older brothers – one into Camaros, the other into Chevy trucks – showed him what it meant to build something and make it your own. By 15, Cordova was working at a local car audio shop. At 16, he landed his first ride: a Chevy S10 that he threw on airbags, dressed up with a two-tone paint job and loaded with a custom sound system.

The S10 eventually gave way to a Chrysler 300, and that’s where the Mopar_® addiction took root. But it wasn’t until 2008, when the LX platform Challenger dropped, that Cordova found his obsession.

“I remember thinking, ‘One day I’m going to own that car. I don’t care what it takes,” he says. “A couple of years later, I was in a position to make it happen. I scoured all over Southern California looking for an RT in my price range. Finally found one two hours away, drove out there, and picked it up. The rest is history.”

The Challenger started stock – nothing flashy. But Cordova had a vision. First came the name: Bandito345. The “Bandito” was a nod to his father’s love of old westerns – gunslinger outlaws, rebels doing things their own way. The “345” referenced the 5.7-liter HEMI^® engine’s 345 cubic inches.

“I designed the logo, started the Instagram page and just went for it,” Cordova explains. “I posted every single day. I was working retail, crazy hours, but on my days off, I’d go out and shoot photos and just keep building the brand.”

The grind paid off. One morning in 2018, Cordova woke up to a notification that changed everything: Dodge Official had followed him. At the time, he had maybe 1,500 followers. The car was still mostly stock.

“I clicked on their profile and saw they had like two million followers, and they only followed maybe 600 or 700 people,” he says. “I was like, ‘Damn, they’re watching me.’ That was the moment I knew I was onto something.”

From there, the build accelerated. Cordova’s color palette had always been red and black, so the car followed suit. But he wasn’t interested in doing what everyone else was doing. No Deadpool wraps. No Joker themes. He wanted something one-of-one.

“There’s a million Deadpool cars out there,” he says. “Great for them if that’s their passion. But I wanted people to see my car and know exactly who it was. Only one Bandito345. That was the goal.”

The turning point came when Cordova sourced a Krotov widebody kit. An aggressive, riveted masterpiece that required cutting fenders, drilling panels and hours of fabrication work.

“I’d never done anything like that before,” Cordova admits. “YouTube University taught me everything. But man, when I finished installing that kit, cutting the fenders myself, lining everything up – there’s no feeling like that. People ask if I cut my fenders myself, and yeah, damn right I did.”

The result is a car that defies easy comparison. The stance is wide, planted, menacing. The dual chrome wrap – chrome black and chrome red – catches light in ways that demand attention. It’s a build that feels like it belongs on the SEMA floor, yet somehow still gets driven hard on Texas highways.

Recently, Cordova decided the looks weren’t enough. After months of research, he bolted a turbo to the 5.7. The RT that had been “plenty” for years suddenly became something else entirely.

“I got a taste of what some of my friends were running in their faster cars, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is fun,'” he says with a laugh. “Now I’m looking at a bigger turbo this winter, upgrading the performance side. I’m not trying to break records, but I want something competitive.”

The balance between show and go is something Cordova constantly thinks about. He’s seen too many builds that go full performance and lose the aesthetic, or vice versa. He wants the middle road – a car that looks like a million bucks but still puts down power when the light turns green.

“There’s always someone faster, always someone building something crazier,” he acknowledges. “But I promise you, if I park mine next to the fastest Hellcat in the world, mine’s getting a little more attention. And that’s not bragging – it’s just what happens when you build something that makes people stop and stare.”

For Cordova, the build has become about more than personal satisfaction. It’s about inspiring the next generation. His 12-year-old son Matthew tags along to car shows, helps with oil changes and beams with pride when kids swarm the Challenger at Cars and Coffee events.

“If a five or six-year-old kid is looking at my car with their jaw on the floor, that’s everything to me,” Cordova says. “I want to be that influence. I want them to know that one day, they can build something like this too. We should be nicer to the next generation than ours was treated.”