Chrysler's Motown Missile: Mopar's Secret Engineering Program at the Dawn of Pro Stock. Geoff Stunkard
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Even as the Race Engineering guys became involved in engine development, the Ramchargers team was winning races. Shown after a victory at the 1963 NHRA Nationals are Herman Mozer and Jim Thornton (standing, left to right); Gary Congdon, Tom Hoover, and Dale Reeker (front row); Dan Mancini and Tom Coddington (middle row); and Mike Buckel and Dick Maxwell (back row). All were smart guys, hard workers, and passionate racers. (Photo Courtesy Spehar Family Archive)
Engine science. For Thomas Meridith Hoover, this subject was his life’s focus for more than a decade, working diligently in the depths of Chrysler Engineering’s buildings in the Motor City. He had been a hot-rodder since high school, and after training as a graduate physicist at Penn State, he landed at the company in 1955, just as performance began to get more serious. Following training at the Chrysler Institute, he worked on various projects as an engine developer until new company President Lynn Townsend called on him in late 1961 to head a new Race Engineering project with the explicit goal to put a Chrysler vehicle into the winner’s circle at “Big Bill” France’s huge superspeedway in Daytona Beach. The Daytona 500 was now important enough to sink real money into. After all, the motto was “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday,” right?
With that as the plan, Tom lost no time surrounding himself with similar-minded gentlemen who he knew within the firm. In fact, he was even somewhat recognized outside of the corporate world, as he and other young members of the Chrysler Engineering team had formed a drag race club in the late 1950s, calling themselves the Ramchargers. This was named after a closely guarded secret about fuel-related intake tuning that the company’s engineers had discovered, scientifically verified, and put into practice while testing the original 1950s-era Chrysler Hemi engine for an Indy Car program.
During the NHRA Nationals drag races held at Detroit Dragway in 1959 and 1960, the ’Chargers had frustrated the tech inspectors with a prewar Plymouth featuring many hair-raising ideas. Mission accomplished. Tom and his band of slide-rule renegades had next jumped into what was known as Stock Eliminator for 1961, where they could measure their technology and prowess against other factory-designed equipment. While NASCAR success may have been a more visible focus on the corporate front, Tom’s own passion was fueled by the quarter-mile bursts (events in which anyone could participate), and the company was soon developing special cars just for this. The first of them used a 413-ci engine using the ram-tuning intake technology, the same 1962 engine package that Jimmy Addison was later street racing. Formally called the Maximum Performance package, it was better known simply as the Max Wedge.
Meanwhile, with the Ramchargers team busy winning races on the weekends, Tom Hoover was hard at work during 1963 getting a reconfigured Hemi cylinder head prepared for future Daytona and drag racing use alike. Working with specialists, including legendary airflow engineer Sir Harry Weslake of England, Hoover determined a way to mount a revised version of the head onto the latest wedge-head 426-ci RB-series engine block. Everyone involved then went to work on a very tight schedule to get the new powerplant to live for a full 500 hard miles—with the dyno cells in Highland Park screaming for hours on end during the winter months of early 1964. The effort was highlighted by near-unreal background drama and a movie-type happy ending—with young star Richard Petty thundering his Hemi Plymouth Belvedere to victory in the final act at the 1964 Daytona 500, leading several other new 426 Hemi Chryslers across the finish line. The world was never the same after that February afternoon. At least not in the automotive world, and certainly not in places such as Woodward Avenue.
Compared to most other engines, the Hemi engine was huge in its overall dimensions, nicknamed by some as as “the elephant motor.” It had big ports and large valves positioned opposite each other at a 53.5-degree axial difference inside a hemispherical (or half dome) combustion chamber. This was a perfection discovered by long-since-retired Chrysler engineers during extensive testing on a wartime airplane engine in the 1940s. It had forged aluminum pistons that were the heaviest design created for a passenger car engine at the time, and a race-specific reciprocating design and hardware that was created for durability. Ultimately, the Hemi created an icon for Chrysler as a company and a lasting legacy for its “godfather,” Tom Hoover.
It also created a lot more headaches for the tech guys and rule makers in all sorts of racing because it could win—which it did, a lot. In fact, NASCAR actually banned the Hemi for 1965 as a non-production engine, allowing Mr. Hoover and company a little spare time to figure out how well it might run on nitromethane fuel in the supercharged Top Fuel dragster environment with a new Ramchargers team dragster. The Ramchargers also raced and won with it that season after installing a fuel-injected variation of the engine into a series of radical creations they had recently dreamed up as an “unlimited stock” idea in late 1964.
These so-called altered-wheelbase machines, featuring the front and rear wheels both pushed far forward beneath the body, quickly became known as Funny Cars. Meanwhile, the factory released a group of 200 1965 all-steel 426 Hemi race cars for the NHRA’s Super Stock class. One of those was a Plymouth Belvedere being successfully campaigned by local racers Dick Housey and Ted Spehar that year. Against this backdrop, work was ongoing throughout 1965 to address the NASCAR problem directly. This was done by creating a more pedestrian version (as if such terms ever applied to a Hemi) of the engine that could be sold in a street “stock production” model.
The ban of the Hemi by NASCAR for 1965 freed up resources to experiment in drag racing, which resulted in cars such as the altered-wheelbase Dodge the Ramchargers campaigned that year, which was both fuel-injected and running nitromethane when this photo was taken. (Photo Courtesy Tom Hoover Archive)
In fact, Mr. Hoover bought one of these cars as soon as they arrived for 1966—a green Dodge Coronet. He once recalled that the car had a brand-new Hemi installed that had been built incorrectly from day one at Chrysler Marine & Engineering, which was where all the code A102 street Hemi engines came together for the street models. Once sorted out, he did some drag tests with it and drove it for fun on the street, sometimes turning it over to Spehar, a man he trusted, for tune-up care and feeding.
Starting in 1965, several factory-associated cars were often under the care of Spehar, who owned a Texaco service center and later a Gulf gas station franchise in the area. On that note, on some occasions, Mr. Hoover made sure he was attending a company or social function in the evening, because Spehar’s mechanic Jimmy Addison was covertly taking the Hoover green meanie out near Woodward to uphold company honor against the other guys. He usually did, too.
Tom Hoover’s factory crew was not huge. His first guys in the Race group were Dante “Dan” Mancini and Jim “B.B.” Thornton, both trusted associates from the Ramchargers team. Indeed, other Race Engineering guys would include fuel systems specialist Tom Coddington, nicknamed “The Ghost,” Ramchargers driver and engine specialist Hartford “Mike” Buckel, and several others, all of whom understood the passion that drove the projects.
Members of the Ramchargers worked throughout other areas of the Chrysler Corporation, where they were called on to do special race-focused projects when their production-associated work was completed. Not commonly recalled is that the Ramchargers (and a sister factory-member team named the Golden Commandos that raced Plymouths) were nearly independent from the corporate offices. Other than what little money could be had from dealership sponsorship and professional access to the factory development tools, it was pretty much an out-of-pocket proposition for both groups, and neither team ever had big factory dollars to live lavishly. The teams relied on member dues and winning real races to stay viable financially. It was ingenuity and dedication that would often spell the difference in that regard.
Science Class
Though professional cars often made racing news headlines, it was the everyman’s stock-class drag racing divisions that remained more important to the factory for promoting new car sales, and the Race Engineering group stayed busy with projects and research related to that during the 1960s. Indeed, many in the team’s cadre of