Chrysler kicked off the classic muscle car era of the mid-’60s with their downsized ’62 Plymouth and Dodge when they dropped in their new high-output Max Wedge 413 V8 in those significantly lighter bodies. This would be the same formula used by the ’64 GTO, often attributed to be the first of its kind. There was just one problem: These 413 and 426 “R” engines were designed for racing; they had wild cams, special heads, ram induction, and didn’t really pick up their skirts until about 3500 rpm or so. This created a bit of a problem as buyers found their cars to be rather unsuitable for the weekday commute.
So for 1964, the same year the GTO arrived, Chrysler came up with the 426-S package, with its engine essentially the same as the tame 413 engine as used in a variety of big Chrysler cars, and standard in the Imperial, but with the larger 4.25″ bore. Its specialty was torque: 375 ft/lbs. of it at 3200 rpm and a peak hp rating of 365 @4800 rpm. It foreshadowed the 375 hp 440 that would replace it in 1967 as a milder counterpart to the street hemi and came to be one of the most potent street engines.
Motor Trend took the new 426-S Sport Fury with Chrysler’s new 4-speed manual to Willow Springs and found it to be a very quick but tractable car with excellent handling and brakes. Too bad they didn’t bring a GTO along for a direct comparison.
M/T notes that they personally knew of two who ordered 426-R equipped Plymouths in 1963 for daily driving, “and are they sorry!”
I found this disclaimer in the front of the 1964 Plymouth SS 426 III manual. It says it all.
So Plymouth’s answer in the form of the 426-S, designed for street use, was a welcome and rather necessary addition for 1964. A single but big Carter AFB four barrel assured that this mill was still able to deliver good power in the upper rev band, just not like the ram-induction Max Wedges.
The rear axle that came was an economy oriented one with 2.93 gears. But the hefty torque of the 426 overcame that limitation quite well, and the Sport Fury spurted from 0-60 in 6.8 seconds and peeled off the 1/4 mile in 15.2 @95.5 mph. A faster rear axle would have improved those numbers, including a 100 mph trap speed. That’s quick, for a quite mildly tuned engine, and right up there in GTO territory, as long as it’s a genuinely stock one.
This ’64 Sport Fury weighed in at some 300 lbs more than the ’63 they tested the previous year. The ’64 restyle undoubtedly accounted for some of that, the tall-block 426 was heavier, the rear axle was 2.1″ wider, and it came with larger heavy duty brakes. But it was only some 180 lbs more than the ’62 413 Dart tested by Car Life. And as a frame of reference, it was some 250 lbs heavier than the ’64 GTO tested by Car Life.
In addition to acceleration testing, the Sport Fury was also wrung out to an “honest 130 mph at 5200 rpm”. Which made these testers a bit sweaty, considering the rayon 4-ply 7.50 x 14 tires. They recommended one of the European brands (Dunlop, Michelin, Pirelli) if one was going to utilize this car’s speed potential.
Fuel economy was surprisingly good, enhanced undoubtedly by the 2.93 rear axle. Even then, the testers were surprised to see 16.2 mpg after a long drive with lots of 75 – 80 mph speeds. In city driving, that dropped to 11-13 mpg. Overall mileage was 13.1 mpg; “this is much better than you could expect out of 426 cubic inches – but those are the figures.”
The heavy duty drum brakes included in the 426-S package resulted in the shortest stopping distances from 60 mph that M/T had ever tested, and that was directly after a couple of hot laps of the circuit. The heavy duty suspension included a heft front roll bar. That actually contributes to increased understeer, but the flatter attitude of the car in fast curves more than compensated for that. M/T speculated that the Plymouth was able to take corners some 1-15 mph faster than one without this suspension package. The wider rear track also contributed to increased stability.
There was one shortcoming: Chrysler located the rear axle well forward of the rear leaf spring centerline to reduce spring wrap-up on hard acceleration, but the downside is that there was severe axle tramp on braking. This had been noted before; it seems obvious which force on the rear axle Chrysler was favoring by doing that.
Assembly quality was deemed good, the seats were comfortable, the steering wheel position was satisfactory as was visibility. The round instruments placed directly in front of the driver gave good legibility, but a tachometer was not included in one of those four.
I noticed a round gauge on the console just ahead of the shifter in the photo, and assumed it was a tach, although there was no mention of it. A bit of searching brought up a rather puzzling set of answers. It appears that this “instrument” was a dummy unless one ordered one of the two other options for it (there is a already a clock in the dash):
One of those options was a vacuum gauge.
And the other was a tach, which of course like others of its kind, was mounted in an abysmal location for serious performance shifting.
What a waste of those four big round instrument openings. Put the damn tach right there next to the speedometer and move the (mostly useless) clock to the console. It’s little stuff like this that makes you wonder just what Detroit was thinking back then.
Related CC reading:
Vintage Car Life Road Test: 1962 Dodge Dart 413 – The Max Wedge Legend Started Here
Vintage Car Life Road Test: 1964 Pontiac GTO – “Honest In Performance”?
The text mentions the 134 foot stopping distance in the specifications chart. Is said chart available?
Thank you for the fine article. I had an uncle with 1965 and 1966 Sport Furies, but they had nothing more exciting than a 383…which was really more than enough for most people.
Somewhat surprisingly, there was none.
Here it is.
Oh that! How did that not make it in the post? It must be the heatwave we’re having. It’s there now.
Seems like this was a very fine al around package. Great looking car, too in my eyes – and the high gearing for relaxed cruising would be a bonus in my books. Would make a great every day driver (with some modern tires) even today….
For whatever reason Detroit in the original muscle car era seemed to put the tachometer anywhere but where it belongs, for some reason lost to time. Steering column appendages, low on the console, outside under a hood scoop, seemingly anywhere except the main gauge cluster next to the speedometer. I hope this wasn’t done because a console-mounted tach was considered “sporty”, in the same way rear-seat headrests or amber rear turn signal indicators were relegated to sporty or Euro-style trims in later decades.
Not only Detroit GMH built a fast coupe finally in 68 and yeah tacho on the console
I have always wondered about why almost no American cars of the period could find room on the dash for a tach. Our 64 Cutlass had one of those under-dash console mounted tachs too. Although with the automatic, the tach was of limited value in that car.
On those rear springs, the forward-located axle and the thicker front portion was a design feature that went back to the first of the “Torsion Aire” cars of 1957. Chrysler said then that the long, thinner rear parts of the leaves was to improve ride while the short, thick front parts of the leaves were to securely keep hold on the axles. I would imagine that the axle hop on hard braking was the inevitable trade-off.
Working as a salesman for manufacturing capacity has given me a fair understanding of mass production economics.
Mass production economics often explain the unexplainable. Chrysler (and others) are almost surely aware of the advantages of placing a tach directly in the dashboard instrument cluster directly in front of the driver. So why wouldn’t they do so?
Final assembly puts together a series of sub-assemblies. The dashboard instrument cluster is a sub-assembly of the car interior. The instrument cluster is made up of sub-assemblies of individual instruments. All are brought together in a series of different assembly processes. If you’re on this site, you probably understand this.
What may be harder to appreciate is the limits every assembly process has on the number of variations it can accomodate before efficiency of the whole process is reduced. A low volume option that pushes an assembly process one step beyond efficient variation limits can have an outsize effect on production economics.
Using the Plymouth or Olds tach placement as an example, there are a lot of process changes required to incorporate this into the dash. Dashboard wiring harnesses of the era would almost certainly not have included a tach hookup. The process of putting in a special wiring harness may not have been an easy change in Chrysler or GM’s assembly lines of the era.
Regional assembly lines were orginally developed to reduce shipping costs. Not every factory had the same flexibility. The proliferation of car and option variants over time forced manufacturers to limit certain option combinations to specific factories that could handle the flexibility.
For a low volume option like this, it likely made more economic sense to accomdate the tach in an off-line process or a subassembly more easily changed than the dash. This was a more manual process done either at the end of the line or pushed down to the dealer. It is more expensive than mass production for the cars equipped with the option, but it avoids slowing down to production of far more numerous standard combinations.
For rare options like this, designers would know in advance this would be an after-assembly line modification. To accomplish this most efficiently, they’d look for a place to put the tach that didn’t involve disassembling the already completed dashboard. The console would be one such place.
I can’t say this is why the tach is where it is. I do know that engineers go to great lengths to introducing changes that affect mass production economics. Auto assembly is a capital intensive process. It is hard to maintain operational profitability if you allow introduction of more varieties of product than the assembly line is designed to accommodate.
IOW, the development and cost to engineer a proper location and connection harness to place the tach where it really needed to go, just wasn’t justified by the anticipated low take rate. It would be far easier to put a clock (which would only need a solitary electric source) in the same location.
A fascinating thing in today’s world where I don’t think there’s a new vehicle left (save electric-powered) that ‘doesn’t’ have a tach in the dash.
Yet Pontiac managed to put one there in the GTO! How hard was that?
The ’63 Tempest optional tach was also in the main cluster. It wasn’t very accurate (nor was the one in the ’64), but it was up there rather than aimed at your knees.
Tachometer location, design, and placement sounds like another great topic for a CC article. Domestic interior design teams of the fifties and early sixties just didn’t seem to have a need to create any sort of binnacle in front of the driver for one. Prior to the advent of cars like the GTO and Mustang, it was all about style, usually around some sort of pointer-and-scale strip speedometer. It’s worth noting that those first Mustangs even used the Falcon’s strip speedometer. If you wanted a factory tach in a ’64-’66 Mustangs, you got the ‘Rally Pac’ which was a small tach and clock mounted on both sides of the steering column.
I guess my explanation wasn’t very clear. Installing a tach in the dash isn’t really the limiting factor. Assembly line ability to accommodate another production variety is the issue.
Almost all assembly lines are designed to accommodate multiple product versions. The variety of product changes they can accommodate is finite based on the design of the line and supporting systems. Quite often line design requires gang runs of certain variations.
Gang running means all cars getting a certain option combinations are run in series. Police cars are often gang run due to the unique nature of option combinations. This allows easy placement of a certified speedometer. Gang runs are a proven assembly technique that minimizes the upstream changes required to synchronize all the feeder lines to final assembly.
I say lines because it is not just final assembly. The instrument cluster is run on a separate line as is the wiring harness. Even within the same manufacturer each assembly line is going to have subtly different capabilities.
GM is one of the world’s largest auto assemblers. They once had more assembly lines than any other company. By the 60s, most of those GM plants were already well versed in accommodating multiple GM brands with various dashboard designs. Ford and Chrysler never had the same need to accommodate as much variety. Their assembly line capabilities were likely designed accordingly.
I won’t pretend to be an expert on the number of variations GM’s dash assembly process could accommodate versus Chrysler’s. What I do believe is that both companies would have some pretty smart production engineers looking at the option combinations they were being asked to accommodate and came up with the most efficient way for their respective operations to handle the various requests.
It isn’t unknown for Sales or Marketing to overrule production economics and insist on some feature regardless of cost. That could be the case at Pontiac, but I suspect GM assembly lines simply had more flexibility on this particular feature.
Rob, I appreciate your comments and insights. But as you said in your last line, sales or marketing could and would overrule production economics. That is precisely my whole point with this article, starting with its title “Chrysler’s GTO But Without Pontiac’s Marketing Savvy”. This Plymouth was every bit as good or better than the GTO, but John DeLorean and his crew had the marketing savvy to create a game changer precisely because of their marketing savvy overriding production economics as well as GM’s edict about no engines larger than 330 cubic inches in intermediates.
As AUWM pointed out, the ’63 Tempest already had a tach available in one of its four round instruments directly in front of the driver. This as well as the other details that were part of the GTO package is exactly what made the GTO so brilliant.
I was very aware of this all in real time back then. These Plymouth and Dodges were nice cars, but there was nothing about them in them or their visuals and packaging to make them stand out, except a minute “426” in the little stand up hood emblem, which already was dorky. The whitewall tires and wheel covers enhanced their dorkyness. These were not cool cars, unlike the Pontiacs.
Chrysler learned this too late: it wouldn’t be until 1967 when they finally had the GTX and R/T, but even these were not quite up to snuff. They really got it in ’68 with the Road Runner.
Production efficiencies are of course very important, but ultimately positioning and marketing are what really sets cars apart. And no one got this more than Pontiac in its golden era.
And I’d wager that GM had nothing to do with Pontiac being able to place a tach in the dash; it was simply a key element that DeLorean insisted on, like the other elements that made these cars special.
The mention of the 1968 Road Runner in terms of instrumentation (specifically, an in-dash tachometer) is an interesting one. All Plymouth intermediates of that year (including the GTO-competitor GTX) used the same horizontal, pointer-and-scale strip speedometer and gauges, with an opening to the far right, next to the temperature gauge for either a small, optional clock or tachometer. The marketing for neither the Road Runner (which Chrysler didn’t think would be a success) nor the GTX justified tooling up a ‘rally’ type dash with an actual binnacle for a real, normal sized tachometer.
Dodge, OTOH, while their lower-trim intermediates used the same Plymouth style strip cluster, had a dedicated ‘rally’ instrument cluster for both the Charger and Coronet R/T where one of the infamous ‘tic-toc-tacs’ could be installed.
What’s interesting is that the when the Road Runner became a hit, Dodge hurried the mid-year Super Bee into production. Its sales were much less relative to the Road Runner, and one of the keys might have been that the Super Bee was slightly more expensive. But for your extra dough, you did get better seating and the Charger instrument cluster, complete with the possibility of a nice-sized tachometer right next to the round speedometer.
“…and peeled off the 1/4 mile in 15.2 @95.5 seconds.” Do we mean 15.2 seconds @95.5 MPH?
Yes we do. And now it says so quite explicitly.
Nice, *very* nice .
My old friend J. had a ’65 (IIRC) two door that looked like this with a V8 and manual tranny, he never did let me tune it and it had plenty of untapped power .
I like how it looks now that I’n old but at the time too Conservative in the looks for me meant I didn’t et to learn how much better MoPars went, turned and stopped versus the other big two .
Better yet the torsion bar suspensions were dead simple to adjust to your particular driving style, habits and needs .
-Nate
“Put the damn tach right there next to the speedometer and move the (mostly useless) clock to the console. It’s little stuff like this that makes you wonder just what Detroit was thinking back then.”
What were they thinking when they stuff a high-torque 426 under the hood, and put an open differential in back? Never mind the highway gears…one wheel peel?
The irony here is that in my experience–limited as it may be–Mother Mopar was more likely to cram a Sure-Grip “Posi” in back than either GM or Ford. GM was outright stingy with them. Sure, they could be ordered at minimal additional cost…but anything on the dealership lot probably did not have a limited-slip axle.
Mashing the accelerator is like uncapping a volcano. The 383 was also a monster.
Appreciate Rob’s comments and Paul’s elaboration; gotcha, fellas.
And I second rudiger’s motion for s future CC on the history of stupid / less stupid tach placements.