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Chrysler Super Stock Hemi - It Makes Children Cry
From a 2009 Hot Rod article....
No-literally. Kids bawled, some screaming, as we left the drive-in with 426 inches of uncorked Super Stock Hemi acting like a fuel-burning time warp to the days of power that these crumb-snatchers will never understand. They may need therapy, but at least their instinctive reaction reflected how, 41 years ago, Chrysler planned to make the competition drop its ice cream.
DaimlerChrysler's current marketing efforts have gone pretty far to make sure you know the Hemi legacy, starting with the fact that the 426 Hemi was introduced at the Daytona 500 in February 1964, where it finished in the top four spots. That NASCAR legacy often overshadows the first drag Hemis, but as HOT ROD's photographic archives can prove, the Race Hemi drag cars were also ready for action by the end of February 1964, though they did not compete at the NHRA Winternationals. At the time, the '64 Mopar B-bodies were still drag racing with Stage III Max Wedge engines, known as Ramchargers when installed in the 50th Anniversary Dodges. The Max Wedge was available during all of 1964, but it was eclipsed by a new midyear Maximum Performance option that the factory literature called the Hemi-Charger for Dodge (though the sticker on the valve covers still said Ramcharger 426) and the Super Commando for Plymouth. The names referred to the same engine-the 426 Race Hemi with 12.5:1 compression, iron "K" heads, an aluminum cross-ram intake (they were magnesium in '65s), and an advertised 425 hp at 5,600 rpm. To ensure the success of the new Hemi in NHRA Super Stock competition, Chrysler built 110 lightweight cars in 1964-55 Dodges and 55 Plymouths rolled off the line at the Hamtramck assembly plant during the weekends of May 1964.
The Hemi-Chargers were the next level beyond the lightweight Max Wedge cars. A Ramcharger V-8 brochure printed in August 1963, described (rather awkwardly) that, "a light-weight aluminum front end package is available for more favorable weight distribution, consisting of aluminum fenders, dust shields, front bumper, bumper support brackets and hood, when ordered with the new car order." The production bumpers are actually thin steel, not aluminum. With the exception of two or three cars rumored to have been built in all-steel, all the '64-'65 Race Hemi cars had the lightweight front end described for Max Wedge cars, plus aluminum doors, Plexiglas side windows, 0.120-inch-thick lightweight Corning backlight glass, magnesium front wheels, lightweight front bucket seats and no back seats, and special leaf springs with 20-inch-long front segments (rather than 21) to move the rear axle forward an inch for rearward weight bias. In the hands of racers, the wheelbase alterations would become more radical as the first of the Funny Cars. Other specific parts included Torqueflites with full-manual valvebodies activated by pushbuttom shifters (it's believed that perhaps four or five of the '64s were factory four-speed cars), 831/44 rearends stuffed with 4.56:1 gears, and unique pinion snubbers and leaf-spring-snubber brackets made of heavy cast iron and intended to shift weight bias to the rear. The trunk-mounted batteries were there for the same reason. Further evidence that these cars were assembled for little more than ease of shipping was the famous exhaust systems featuring radical tubular headers with cast-iron flanges and four-bolt cutout plates on the Y-pipe, but with a measly single exhaust and muffler. These weren't sold to drive. They were built to be torn down and raced.
All these facts about the gung-ho days of factory Super Stock wars have been regurgitated to death. Especially with the new wave of musclecar price insanity, guys love to reminisce about the glory of retro horsepower far more than they like to actually live it. That sucks. So we called our pal Steve Atwell in Walled Lake, Michigan, who just wrapped up the restoration of a Hemi-Charger, and told him we were going for a drive. He agreed. His car is the only factory black '64 Dodge Super Stocker. It was sold new in California but never raced beyond a few blasts at the recently demolished Carlsbad Raceway near San Diego. Thirty years later, after a trade for a '69 Hemi Daytona, the '64 wound up in Atwell's hands with just 249 original miles on the odo and with all the original aluminum sheetmetal intact. Steve rebuilt the drivetrain and hit it with a fresh coat of flawless black. Everything about the car is factory stock except for a Pertronix electronic-ignition conversion inside the stock distributor, non-magnesium front wheels, and Pro Trac tires. With some foam stuck to the underside of those fragile front fenders to prevent pebble dings, we were ready for the maiden voyage in a virtually original, factory '64 Super Stocker.
Our first stop was Michigan's Milan Dragway for what was probably the car's first trip down the dragstrip in nearly 40 years. It roasted the tires well, but the vintage solid-core spark-plug wires wreaked havoc with the electronic ignition, so shootin' ducks kept the car in the 14.00s-hardly the 11.30s that these things ran in race trim during early '64 NHRA competition. The Dodge would need some tuning, but the few passes we made were enough to pucker the aluminum lift-off hood around each of the four hood-pin scuff plates, the result of underhood pressure through the hoodscoop causing the sheetmetal to tug upward. Seeing this firsthand made us realize how quickly these cars must have destroyed themselves in competition-not only from racers hacking them into altered-wheelbase junk, but just from slamming doors and leaning on fenders. If you swing a door open too hard, it overextends the fragile aluminum hinges. If you shut a door wrong, it leaves a shallow dent around the handle. No wonder so many of these were painted flaw-hiding white.
The car holds an odd juxtaposition of delicacy and sinister brutality. At the dragstrip, the uncorked exhaust really didn't seem too loud, but on the street, it's truly ludicrous. The Hemi will foul the plugs in just a few minutes with the stock single-exhaust system hooked up, so we cruised with the factory bypass plates swung open and pretty quickly realized that the parents of one of those brats at the burger place was probably gonna call the cops. That just meant we had to get away faster, and we never got tired of the Hemi's song for as long as we relaxed in that pristine, all-original red interior. Radio delete. Heater delete. No back seat, visors, or outside rearview mirror. Steve poked at the Torqueflite buttons and our heads snapped as the 4.56s bit back at Second gear. Then Third. Heaven. A few add-on Auto Meter gauges claimed that we were going to live.
Then the smoke started. It was just a little at first, then a James Bond smoke screen out the left side upon deceleration. We ducked into Earl Brown's pad, a friend along the way, and pulled out the tools and wrenched just like it was high school and we'd sunk a float on our 340 Duster. The carbs were off in a few minutes, and oil was evident in the intake floor. The threaded access plugs were removed from the cross-ram, and we found that all the intake bolts had loosened up. With a new motor, we should've checked that sooner. But we were back in the noise.
The rest of the night we pretty much just drove aimlessly, content in the knowledge that we were the only guys in the world who were out for a cruise in an original lightweight Hemi Super Stocker. We relived the Detroit that was devoid of fear, or at least one shorter on litigation and government mandates. The experience explained some of the misty-eyed nostalgia among guys who'd lived through these cars when they were new. Yet, at the same time, who drove one of these on the street when they were new? No one then, no one now. No one but us, who, on a single night, added 25 percent to the mileage that the car had seen in the past 41 years combined.
And that's how musclecars are meant to be used.
From a 2009 Hot Rod article....
No-literally. Kids bawled, some screaming, as we left the drive-in with 426 inches of uncorked Super Stock Hemi acting like a fuel-burning time warp to the days of power that these crumb-snatchers will never understand. They may need therapy, but at least their instinctive reaction reflected how, 41 years ago, Chrysler planned to make the competition drop its ice cream.
DaimlerChrysler's current marketing efforts have gone pretty far to make sure you know the Hemi legacy, starting with the fact that the 426 Hemi was introduced at the Daytona 500 in February 1964, where it finished in the top four spots. That NASCAR legacy often overshadows the first drag Hemis, but as HOT ROD's photographic archives can prove, the Race Hemi drag cars were also ready for action by the end of February 1964, though they did not compete at the NHRA Winternationals. At the time, the '64 Mopar B-bodies were still drag racing with Stage III Max Wedge engines, known as Ramchargers when installed in the 50th Anniversary Dodges. The Max Wedge was available during all of 1964, but it was eclipsed by a new midyear Maximum Performance option that the factory literature called the Hemi-Charger for Dodge (though the sticker on the valve covers still said Ramcharger 426) and the Super Commando for Plymouth. The names referred to the same engine-the 426 Race Hemi with 12.5:1 compression, iron "K" heads, an aluminum cross-ram intake (they were magnesium in '65s), and an advertised 425 hp at 5,600 rpm. To ensure the success of the new Hemi in NHRA Super Stock competition, Chrysler built 110 lightweight cars in 1964-55 Dodges and 55 Plymouths rolled off the line at the Hamtramck assembly plant during the weekends of May 1964.
The Hemi-Chargers were the next level beyond the lightweight Max Wedge cars. A Ramcharger V-8 brochure printed in August 1963, described (rather awkwardly) that, "a light-weight aluminum front end package is available for more favorable weight distribution, consisting of aluminum fenders, dust shields, front bumper, bumper support brackets and hood, when ordered with the new car order." The production bumpers are actually thin steel, not aluminum. With the exception of two or three cars rumored to have been built in all-steel, all the '64-'65 Race Hemi cars had the lightweight front end described for Max Wedge cars, plus aluminum doors, Plexiglas side windows, 0.120-inch-thick lightweight Corning backlight glass, magnesium front wheels, lightweight front bucket seats and no back seats, and special leaf springs with 20-inch-long front segments (rather than 21) to move the rear axle forward an inch for rearward weight bias. In the hands of racers, the wheelbase alterations would become more radical as the first of the Funny Cars. Other specific parts included Torqueflites with full-manual valvebodies activated by pushbuttom shifters (it's believed that perhaps four or five of the '64s were factory four-speed cars), 831/44 rearends stuffed with 4.56:1 gears, and unique pinion snubbers and leaf-spring-snubber brackets made of heavy cast iron and intended to shift weight bias to the rear. The trunk-mounted batteries were there for the same reason. Further evidence that these cars were assembled for little more than ease of shipping was the famous exhaust systems featuring radical tubular headers with cast-iron flanges and four-bolt cutout plates on the Y-pipe, but with a measly single exhaust and muffler. These weren't sold to drive. They were built to be torn down and raced.
All these facts about the gung-ho days of factory Super Stock wars have been regurgitated to death. Especially with the new wave of musclecar price insanity, guys love to reminisce about the glory of retro horsepower far more than they like to actually live it. That sucks. So we called our pal Steve Atwell in Walled Lake, Michigan, who just wrapped up the restoration of a Hemi-Charger, and told him we were going for a drive. He agreed. His car is the only factory black '64 Dodge Super Stocker. It was sold new in California but never raced beyond a few blasts at the recently demolished Carlsbad Raceway near San Diego. Thirty years later, after a trade for a '69 Hemi Daytona, the '64 wound up in Atwell's hands with just 249 original miles on the odo and with all the original aluminum sheetmetal intact. Steve rebuilt the drivetrain and hit it with a fresh coat of flawless black. Everything about the car is factory stock except for a Pertronix electronic-ignition conversion inside the stock distributor, non-magnesium front wheels, and Pro Trac tires. With some foam stuck to the underside of those fragile front fenders to prevent pebble dings, we were ready for the maiden voyage in a virtually original, factory '64 Super Stocker.
Our first stop was Michigan's Milan Dragway for what was probably the car's first trip down the dragstrip in nearly 40 years. It roasted the tires well, but the vintage solid-core spark-plug wires wreaked havoc with the electronic ignition, so shootin' ducks kept the car in the 14.00s-hardly the 11.30s that these things ran in race trim during early '64 NHRA competition. The Dodge would need some tuning, but the few passes we made were enough to pucker the aluminum lift-off hood around each of the four hood-pin scuff plates, the result of underhood pressure through the hoodscoop causing the sheetmetal to tug upward. Seeing this firsthand made us realize how quickly these cars must have destroyed themselves in competition-not only from racers hacking them into altered-wheelbase junk, but just from slamming doors and leaning on fenders. If you swing a door open too hard, it overextends the fragile aluminum hinges. If you shut a door wrong, it leaves a shallow dent around the handle. No wonder so many of these were painted flaw-hiding white.
The car holds an odd juxtaposition of delicacy and sinister brutality. At the dragstrip, the uncorked exhaust really didn't seem too loud, but on the street, it's truly ludicrous. The Hemi will foul the plugs in just a few minutes with the stock single-exhaust system hooked up, so we cruised with the factory bypass plates swung open and pretty quickly realized that the parents of one of those brats at the burger place was probably gonna call the cops. That just meant we had to get away faster, and we never got tired of the Hemi's song for as long as we relaxed in that pristine, all-original red interior. Radio delete. Heater delete. No back seat, visors, or outside rearview mirror. Steve poked at the Torqueflite buttons and our heads snapped as the 4.56s bit back at Second gear. Then Third. Heaven. A few add-on Auto Meter gauges claimed that we were going to live.
Then the smoke started. It was just a little at first, then a James Bond smoke screen out the left side upon deceleration. We ducked into Earl Brown's pad, a friend along the way, and pulled out the tools and wrenched just like it was high school and we'd sunk a float on our 340 Duster. The carbs were off in a few minutes, and oil was evident in the intake floor. The threaded access plugs were removed from the cross-ram, and we found that all the intake bolts had loosened up. With a new motor, we should've checked that sooner. But we were back in the noise.
The rest of the night we pretty much just drove aimlessly, content in the knowledge that we were the only guys in the world who were out for a cruise in an original lightweight Hemi Super Stocker. We relived the Detroit that was devoid of fear, or at least one shorter on litigation and government mandates. The experience explained some of the misty-eyed nostalgia among guys who'd lived through these cars when they were new. Yet, at the same time, who drove one of these on the street when they were new? No one then, no one now. No one but us, who, on a single night, added 25 percent to the mileage that the car had seen in the past 41 years combined.
And that's how musclecars are meant to be used.
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