A (not so) Brief History of the Muscle Car - Part 1

When I got my drivers license in 1976, the only cars I (and most other working-class teenagers) could afford were well worn 1960s muscle cars. With plain-jane 1960s Mustangs and Chevelles and such selling for north of $20K today that probably seems a little unbelievable, but in 1976 we had just weathered the first OPEC engineered oil crisis. Leaving the politics and economics involved for another day, in the fall of 1973 the price of gasoline at the pump had gone up from less than $0.50 per gallon to more than $0.70 a gallon (remember minimum wage then was just $2.30/hour). Worse than the price hike, for several months there was a shortage of gas combined with panic buying that caused gas stations to literally run out - which at the time seemed akin to the sun not rising.

Suddenly all anyone cared about was fuel efficiency. Everyone wanted 6 cylinder Dodge Darts and Ford Mavericks; big-block muscle cars filled the classified ads at give-away prices.  Since high school kids don't drive all that much or have families to support, we were the only ones who could afford to drive 10mpg cars (just not very far). I bought my '69 Road Runner, with 70K miles on the clock and one dented quarter panel - for a whopping $500! As a result my high school parking lot looked like a scene out of American Graffiti.

As I now approach curmudgeon-dom (hold on a second while I chase some kids off the lawn :) - I'm often amazed at the confused and generally rose-colored view that today's car buffs have of those halcyon days. Like most (all?) 1960s American cars, muscle cars had the aerodynamics of a brick, the handling of a well worn pickup truck, and they rusted faster than a 16 year old kid could sling Bondo. The only things they did really well was go like stink and attract attention like Miley Cyrus at an awards show - and being part of that sure was fun!



I wanted to tell the real story of the muscle car era, but I couldn't decide where to begin - so I pretty much started at the beginning and spent way more time than I ever planned on this subject.  So sit back and read along, and by all means let me know what I got wrong!

From the earliest days of the automobile, there have been performance cars.  While the very first cars were largely curiosities that were less capable than a good horse, by the 1920s high end car makers such as Bentley, Cadillac, Duesenberg, and others were offering models with top speeds approaching 100 mph (if you could find a road straight and smooth enough to drive that fast). Today these would be considered sports cars or  GT cars or maybe exotics, as they also cost quite a bit more than the Ford Model Ts and As and Chevrolet 490s that everyday people were driving then.

1929 Duesenberg

Throughout the 1920s  mass market cars were getting by with 4 cylinder engines more like something designed for a tractor than the hi-tech 4 cylinder engines you'll find in a modern Ford or Honda. The Model T - which sold a whopping 15 million cars - had a 2.9L flathead 4 with all of 20 horsepower and a top speed around 40mph. It could also run on kerosene or alchohol or most anything semi-flammable you might have to pour in the tank!

Ford's Model T had gone into production in 1908; by the early 1920s it was looking a little dated, and many were simply worn out after hard lives on farms and such (if you lived in a city with good streets and streetcars or commuter trains, you probably had little use for a car).  As the number and quality of roads increased, people were looking for a car that could comfortably travel longer distances, which would make them appealing to a much larger number of buyers. General Motors saw this as an opportunity to overtake Ford's dominance in the lucrative low-price but extremely high volume part of the market; they targeted the newly acquired Chevrolet division to go head to head with Ford.

By 1925 Chevy had evolved their model 490 from a Model-T clone into a reasonably modern car with a steel body, fully enclosed passenger compartment (optional) and smooth running steel wheels (also optional), but still powered by a low-tech 4 cylinder engine. In 1927 Ford would introduce the new Model A, a much improved replacement for the T, powered by a new and improved 4 cylinder engine now producing 40hp and capable of 60mph.  Chevy would one-up Ford in 1929 with a new inline 6 cylinder engine. The 6 produced little more power than Ford's new 4-cylinder, but many prestigious cars of the time had 6 or 8 cylinder engines; the 6 gave Chevy a bit of prestige and bragging rights, and helped them steal business away from rival Ford.

For 1932, Ford would return the favor when they introduced an all new car with the first volume production, reasonably priced V8 engine. Although officially named the type 18, the new car quickly became known simply as the V8 Ford.  Just like Chevrolet's 6, Ford's flathead V8 was not especially sophisticated - cranking out just 65 horespower - but until that time only high end cars were packing more than 6 cylinders.  Like a one-eyed man in the land of the blind, Ford's V8 was king of mass market automobiles.

Through out the 1930s Ford sold the type 18s and subsequent models as fast as they could build them. Thanks to the Great Depression and WWII, other car makers were hard pressed to catch up; Ford would ride the success of that first V8 into the post war period, when things started to get really interesting.

In 1929, Chrysler - one of the more prestigious car makers of the time - had created Plymouth - a brand of low-priced cars to compete directly with Ford and Chevy. Plymouths were priced about the same as the Fords and Chevys but generally offered slightly better technology; during the 1930s most Plymouths were powered by straight 6 cylinder engines that made as much power as the V8 Fords. Plymouth's strong value for money was perfect for the Depression; before Pearl Harbor rolled around it had become the number 3 brand in America and helped keep parent Chrysler afloat through the lean years of the Depression.

Moreover, the Plymouth strategy set the tone for that pre-war decade, with an emphasis on cost, reliability and efficiency ahead of flash and style. Those (not many) with a few extra dollars could splurge on a V8 Ford, but many buyers settled for the more practical and cheaper Chevy or Plymouth..

Following WWII, Americans were back to work and hungry for new cars. Detroit's factories had been building tanks and bombers and jeeps for 4 years, but by 1946 they were building cars again - although most had simply dusted off the tooling from 1941 and started cranking out the same cars they had been building 5 years earlier.

Chevy, Ford and Plymouth were all just parts of larger companies that built broad lineups of cars under various brands. Chevy was part of General Motors, which owned Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac (plus a few others that came and went). Ford owned Mercury and Lincoln, which paralleled the structure of GM on a slightly smaller scale; likewise Plymouth was part of Chrysler, which also owned the Dodge and De Soto brands.  Between them, these 3 companies - known as the "Big 3" - accounted for about 80% of all new cars sold in the US.

Prior to WWII, the other brands owned by the Big 3 were building fairly high end cars compared to the Fords, Chevys and Plymouths. As automobiles became more indispensable to American life, automakers started to rethink this strategy. Competition and economies of scale were pushing up the quality of the low end cars so much that it was hard to build a high end car that justified a price 10 times more than a base-model Chevy.  If the low-end products were generating so much profit, it made sense to shift some of those high end brands down a notch to appeal to buyers who wanted something nicer than an everyday Ford (or Chevy or Plymouth) but couldn't  afford the big step up to a Mercury (or Oldsmobile or Dodge).

In addition to the Big 3, at the end of WWII there were still a few small independent auto makers fighting for a piece of the pie, most notably Packard, Studebaker, Hudson and Nash.  Faced with the overwhelming sales volume of Ford and GM, these companies were desperately trying to duplicate the success that Chrysler had with Plymouth in breaking into the low-price part of the market. 

Remember the Baby Boomers? In 1950, the oldest Boomers were still toddlers and their parents were buying houses in newly built suburbs where dad had to drive to work and mom had to drive the kids to little league and ballet lessons. Families would soon find they needed two cars, at least one of them capable of hauling a complete Cub Scout troop in the backseat.  Detroit responded by making cars bigger and bigger, which created the need for more powerful engines.

Even though many automakers had developed sophisticated inline 6 and 8 cylinder engines during the 1930s and 40s, the success of Ford's V8 had raised the bar for buyers. Automakers knew they would need modern V8s to be competitive in the 1950s.

GM began developing modern overhead-valve V8s - different designs for each of its many brands - starting with a redesigned Cadillac V8 and the Oldsmobile Rocket V8 in 1949, followed by the Buick Nailhead V8 in 1953, and the Pontiac Strato-Streak and the legendary "small block Chevy" in 1954. Chrysler would introduce their "FirePower" hemi-head V8 in 1950 and develop similar but strangely different variants for DeSoto and Dodge; Plymouth would wait until 1955 for the cheaper non-hemi polyspheric variant of the Chrysler V8. Ford would revise their now dated "flathead" V8 for 1948 and use it until 1954 when they would launch their first modern overhead-valve "Y-block" V8.

Of the independents, Studebaker launched a (smallish) V8 in 1951. Packard would finally produce a V8 in 1955, a somewhat uninspired engine that cribbed from the latest Cadillac V8s. Hudson had entered the 50s with a very good 6 cylinder engine - as powerful as many of the V8s of the time - but car buyers wanted V8s ; Hudson would eventually license Packard's V8. Nash had concentrated on smaller cars and never needed or could afford to develop a V8; they would merge with Hudson in 1954 to form American Motors Corporation. AMC would finally develop its own new V8 in 1956.

Being first to the party gave Oldsmobile a golden opportunity: they would fit their new V8 to both their big 98 and their new 88, a smaller, lighter car with modern (for 1949) styling. With 50 more horsepower than Ford's now hoary flathead V8, the Rocket 88 would dominate the newly created NASCAR race series (back when they actually raced stock cars), radically change Oldsmobile's stodgy image and give car buyers their first taste of high performance.

With all of these companies offering similar cars with similar engines and chasing the same buyers, getting customers to even consider a particular brand became a matter of marketing. Automakers soon learned that marketing went beyond billboards and magazine ads;. they would support various kinds of racing, give cars to celebrities, provide cars for movies and TV shows - anything to get their products noticed.  Someone at tiny Hudson came up with the idea of the halo car: a special model or package that existed largely to catch the buyer's attention and get them into the showroom to at least look, even if they then bought a less flashy model.

The Hudson Hornet was introduced in 1951 to do battle with the new Rocket 88 Oldsmobiles. Hudson had long been an upmarket brand with a reputation for good engineering and quality, and the same stodgy image as Oldsmobile. Independent Hudson did not have the vast resources of General Motors, so developing a new V8 on short order was out of the question, but they had a big (308 cubic inch) modern inline 6, to which they added the Twin-H-Power option (higher compression and dual carburetors), producing an Oldsmobile beating 175hp. They also broke ground with the Hornet name, being one of the first cars with a name that sounded more like a fighter plane than some sort of kitchen appliance.  The Hornet would rule NASCAR for the next 4 years, but never managed to overcome the stigma of its 6-cylinder engine; Hudson would eventually merge with Nash and soon after disappear as a brand.

1953 Packard Caribbean

In 1953 Packard would go the halo route, creating the Caribbean, a somewhat glitzy (at least by Packard standards) convertible. Initially fitted with Packard's aging straight 8, in 1955 Packard would fit their new 275 horse V8 and offer the Caribbean in several striking two-tone paint treatments. The car was a modest success but too little, too late to save Packard; by 1958 Packard had merged with Studebaker and likewise disappeared.

1955 was a big year for halo cars. Chrysler had been quietly building their first generation hemi-head V8 since 1950, but the big displacement hemis were destined to drag around monstrous Chrysler Imperials and DeSotos. But Chrysler was tired of seeing Oldsmobile and Hudson get all the NASCAR publicity. In '55 they would launch the Chrysler 300, named for its 300 horsepower 331 inch hemi engine - complete with solid lifters and dual 4-barrel carburetors - and win 18 NASCAR races.

1955 was also the year Chevy introduced their first V8, officially known as the Turbo-fire engine, but soon to be famous as the "mouse motor" or just the "small block Chevy". Being the last GM division to develop a V8 allowed Chevy to learn from the rest of GM; their engine was physically smaller and lighter than the Oldsmobile and Buick V8s, with an innovative cylinder head that would set the standard for the next 40 years. Being smaller and lighter meant Chevy could fit this engine to smaller and lighter cars, yielding some of the best power-to-weight ratios of any American car at the time. That first year, Chevy would fit the new engine to their new BelAir and the struggling Corvette. Displacing just 265 cubic inches and making as much as 195 hp set a new performance benchmark and gave the Corvette a new lease on life as Chevy's  halo car.

After merging with Packard, Studebaker had access to Packard's V8; they would install it in their own Golden Hawk halo car. The big 352 inch Packard V8 in the mid-size Studebaker body made for surprising performance (when they ran out of Packard engines, Studebaker would use a super-charged version of their own 289 V8). The Golden Hawk was another example of too little, too late, Studebaker would straggle on for another few years before closing the doors for good in 1965.

Not to be left out of the halo club, Ford would introduce their two seater Thunderbird in 1955, powered by their new Y-block V8.  The Y-block was a more old-school design than the new Chevy V8, with a deep skirted crankcase extending below the crankshaft center-line, but it actually out performed the Chevy in stock form.  Ford would sell a lot of two seater Thunderbirds and more than anything that success kept the struggling Corvette alive through those early days.

1955 would also be fateful for two highly visible tragedies: in June at Le Mans a Mercedes 300SLR would go airborne into a spectator stand, killing 80+ people and injuring dozens of others.  And in September, American movie actor James Dean would die while driving his new Porsche 550 to a race in Salinas CA. Fast cars were getting the wrong kind of attention, and American auto makers began to worry that the government would start writing safety regulations.

GM, with slightly more than 50% of the American market really wanted to keep a low profile lest too much attention got the feds start thinking about the M word (as in GM might be a monopoly in need of breaking up). So in 1957 American automakers would enter a gentleman's agreement banning support for auto racing. While they would still build sporty cars, they agreed not to sponsor racing teams or advertise performance numbers, and GM went so far as to set limits on engine size for their various models.

The new American Motors Company (a merger of Hudson and Nash) would produce a new kind of car in 1957: an intermediate size sedan - smaller than the full size Fords and Chevys - with AMCs new 327 inch V8. Named the Rambler Rebel, it showed little AMC daring to go outside the box to compete with the big boys. While the big-motor Rebel could match a Corvette in 0-60 times, it looked like a scaled-down Edsel; it didn't sell well and the next year the 327 engine option would be gone, with only AMC's smaller 250 V8 available.

As the 50s wore on the demand for ever bigger cars continued.  The first round of V8s had displaced roughly 300-330 cubic inches, but it soon became clear that wasn't enough for the land-yachts Americans craved. For 1958 engineers would go back to their drawing boards, either stretching their original engine designs or penning entirely new "big blocks" to complement their existing "small block" engines.  Chevy would debut their new "W" motor - a slightly reworked 348 cubic inch truck engine in their new full-size Impala and rival Ford would trot out its new FE V8, including a high performance 352 inch version known as the Interceptor, for the full size Ford.

1958 was also the first big glitch in the post-war US economy. After more than 10 years of rapid growth, inflation was starting to worry the Feds, so starting in 1955 they had slowed government spending just a little bit. However industry had forgotten how to slow down; they kept cranking out consumer goods until suddenly in the fall of 1957 there was way more stuff on store shelves than there was money to buy it. The bubble had burst: unemployment ticked up a few points, which scared those who still had jobs enough to slow spending on frivolous things like chrome-laden high-horsepower automobiles. The Recession of 1958 (also known as the Eisenhower Recession) would only last a few months, but it made Americans a little skittish about spending. Cars finally stopped getting bigger, and the seeds were sown for what would become intermediate and compact sized cars.

For the next few years the fall out of the recession and the racing ban put a damper on halo cars, at least those with an emphasis on performance. To be sure, all of the Big 3 cheated on the "ban", but they did it quietly: big engines could still be ordered from the factory, but they were referred to as "heavy duty" rather than "high performance". Racing parts destined for NASCAR teams, often with no official part numbers, were delivered through back-door channels.

1962 Studebaker Avanti

Studebaker would take one last shot at a halo car, producing the Avanti in 1962: a sporty coupe with pony-car proportions and a supercharged 289 V8. Sadly the Avanti was the last gasp for Studebaker; less than 2 years later Studebaker would stop producing cars, having built as many Avanti's in that entire time as Ford would come to build 65 Mustangs in a week.

By the early 1960s, the first generation V8s from the 50s had made their way into hot-rods, giving young (and youthful) Americans a taste of the performance a big motor in a lightweight car could provide. At the same time European makes were making inroads into the US auto market:  VW's Beetle was making a reputation as super-cheap basic transportation, while Porsches and Jaguars and Austin Healeys and such were getting attention from youthful buyers. Gas was cheap, unemployment was virtually non-existent and high performance was in the air.

At Ford and Pontiac two young and hungry executives - Lee Iacoca and John Delorean - recognized the value of performance as a way to market and promote cars. They would simply ignore the gentlemen's agreement and build the cars they knew would sell.  Ford had a new compact car, the Falcon, and an all new small V8 displacing as much as 289 cubic inches; Ford would combine the two and add racy sheet metal to create the sporty Mustang. Over at Pontiac, Delorean would shoehorn their big 389 V8 into the mid-size Tempest to create the GTO. Both cars would hit the showrooms in 1964, and were an example of being in the right place at the right time: they would sell so well that other car makers couldn't ignore them.

Chrysler was in a somewhat odd position; for the 1962 model year they had downsized their full size Dodges and Plymouths (which were really big) to a size somewhere between the mid-size and full-size cars being offered by Ford and GM. That meant in 1964 Chrysler already had a (more-or-less) mid-size car available with big V8s, including a monstrous 413 with dual 4 barrel carbs. Depending on how you look at it, that made Chrysler either early or late to the muscle car party: while they were manufacturing what were essentially muscle cars as early as 1962, they didn't start marketing them as such until 1966 when they introduced the fast-back Dodge Charger intermediate.

In the immortal words of Mick Jagger, "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing". By the end of 1964 Oldsmobile would offer the 442 with a hotted up 330 inch V8 and Chevy would add their hot 327 inch V8 to the new intermediate Chevelle. The real tipping point may have been the introduction of Chevy's new big-block "mystery motor". Developed largely to keep up with Ford's new FE big-block in NASCAR racing, the Chevy big-block (soon to be known as the "rat motor") made no pretense of being a station-wagon motor; it was a thoroughly modern hi-performance design that dominated NASCAR. And in 1965, Chevy was ready to stuff it under the hood of every car they built. The rat-motor would ignite the horsepower wars in a way no one could have imagined just two years earlier.

With cars flying out of the showroom the semi-fictional un-official racing ban would quietly fade from memory. By 1966 Ford, Mercury, Chevy, Pontiac, Oldsmobile and even Buick and AMC would have a mid-size car with a 400 cubic inch engine and 300+ horsepower, 4 speed transmissions and racy sounding nameplates. And while the Mustang ruled the newly created pony-car niche (challenged only by the frumpy looking Barracuda and eccentric Corvair) GM and Chrysler had solid competitors (Camaro, Firebird and a greatly improved Barracuda) in the works for the '67 model year. The next three years were a free-for-all, with every automaker willing to stuff their biggest V8s into their smallest cars. The muscle-car era was in full-swing and would escalate every year for the rest of the decade; by 1969 every auto maker would have an engine flirting with (or outright breaking) the 400 horsepower mark stuffed into the smallest cars they offered.

What made these cars successful beyond their value as halo cars - in a way the Rocket 88 or the Golden Hawk never managed?

For starters, the cars offered a combination of performance and flash in a very affordable and practical package. Unlike a two-seat sports car that was worthless as a family grocery-getter, a GTO or RoadRunner had a perfectly usable backseat and trunk; even the Mustang had a token backseat that a young father could rationalize would hold the kids - at least until they were six or seven years old! From a manufacturer's standpoint, it cost little more to build a big engine than a small one, and heavy-duty brakes and suspension parts were often "borrowed" from full size cars. In 1964, the GTO package added about $600 to the cost of a $3000 Tempest - not a small amount at the time, but not a lot when spread over 36 easy monthly payments!

Maybe more importantly was that the US economy was booming. The muscle-car is often thought of as a baby-boom phenomena, but in 1964 the oldest Boomers were just 18 years old; few of them were able to make a $100 per month new car payment. But thanks to the Depression, the generation preceding the boomers - the so called Silent Generation - was as unusually small as the Boomer Generation was unusually large. That translated to a labor shortage in the second half of the 1960s, when unemployment averaged a record low 4%. Everyone was working and post-war optimism was still very much alive; a big-block GTO with three carburetors seemed like a fairly small indulgence!

And then, after just 6 years - like the proverbial bolt from the blue -  America's fling with high performance would be over.  But that's a story for another day.