One of the winning Plymouths crosses the finish line at the end of the 1953 Carrera Panamericana Mexico, a multi-day road race that covered the length of Mexico. Plymouths dominated the Small Stock Car class that year with their new HEMI engines.
Road Noise Little-Known Chrysler Road Racing
Words: Roger Meiners
Racing in America, the SCCA Trans Am, IMSA and National Road Racing
Dodge became something of a power on the road courses of the USA and Canada during the decades of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, starting with the A-body Dart—after Plymouth killed off NASCAR’s foray into road racing in the early 1960s at Daytona. There the Plymouth Valiant Hyper Paks took the first six places in a made-for TV debut of NASCAR’s ambitious road race series (See the September-October 2009 issue of Mopar® Magazine for that story).
Bob Tullius won the Over 2-Liter Class and finished second in the first SCCA Trans-Am race in a Group 44 Dodge Dart 273 V-8 at Sebring, Fla., in March 1966. He followed up with an overall win at Marlboro, Md., that year. Ron Grable raced another 1966 Dart 273 in Trans Am and in SCCA club Nationals’ “A” Sedan class. These Dodges may even have been the little-known “D-Dart” Super Stock lightweights converted for road racing. Meanwhile Chrysler engineer Scott Harvey and Charlie Rainville’s Team Starfish campaigned Barracudas in Trans Am (and Harvey won the prestigious Shell 4000 in 1968—but that’s another story for this column).
In 1970 Plymouth and Dodge made a serious run at the Trans Am championship with two teams—Sam Posey in a Challenger and Dan Gurney with Swede Savage in ‘Cudas. Both Chrysler divisions built special editions of their super coupes—the AAR ‘Cuda and the Challenger T/A—to qualify for the series. The teams ran only the 1970 season, which was a high-water mark for factory-sponsored road racing in the United States. Plymouth, Dodge, Ford, Mercury, Chevrolet and American Motors all had serious programs with top-tier drivers such as Posey, Gurney, Savage, Mark Donohue, Jim Hall, Peter Revson, George Follmer, Vic Elford and Parnelli Jones.
After 1970 the performance market waned as car companies, Chrysler included, spent most of thier resources meeting the new ever-more-rigorous emissions and fuel economy standards. Factory-sponsored road racing gave way to emphasis on NASCAR.
But road racing in the later 1970s and 1980s continued, as private teams campaigned in the SCCA and the new International Motor Sports Association arenas, most notably the IMSA Firehawk series, where Dodge and Plymouth front-drive cars based on Dodge Omni and Plymouth Horizon platforms were the instrument of choice. The Dodge Charger raced in SCCA club events and the Sport Class in the Firehawk endurance series with drivers such as Kal Showket, Joe Varde and the Paul Rossi team.
The 1980s were more about fun and club racing—and Dodge front-drivers worked just fine for that.
We have not forgotten about the huge showroom stock Plymouth and Dodge Neon ACR program of the 1990s. This story deserves its own space in a later issue.
The Carrera Panamericana
This race was created by the Mexican government to publicize the new Pan-American Highway that the country had just completed in the hope of attracting much needed dollars to its always-hurting economy. The Carrera caught the imagination of many in the United States and Europe during its 4-year run from 1951 through 1954. The race was a natural for the new Chrysler HEMI®, the most powerful production engine in the world in 1951. Eleven Chryslers were entered that year, and one finished third behind two Ferraris; an amazing accomplishment at the time—or any time. The last time Chrysler did anything like that was at LeMans in 1928.
The 24 Hours of Le Mans
European gentlemen racers embraced Chryslers as their weapons of choice for the 24 Hours of Le Mans in the late 1920s—finishing third and fourth in the 1928 race in Chrysler 72s. Then, in the early 1950s, another gentleman racer—Briggs Cunningham—assaulted Le Mans with Chrysler HEMI-engine cars under his own name. Briggs himself and Bill Spear finished fourth in the 1952 race. John Fitch and Phil Walters placed third the next year, with Cunningham and Spear seventh. The team took third and fifth in 1954 to close out the team’s success.
Viper had it’s heyday at Le Mans from 1996 to 2000 and in 2001 Team Oreca fielded a prototype called the Chrysler-Mopar LMP2001 after the Viper program ended. The Chrysler-Mopar (so named because it used a Mopar sprint car engine) finished fourth, beating all prototypes other than those of the hugely-funded and all-conquering Audi team that dominated Le Mans for nine straight years (including the year an Audi with Bentley bodywork won the race).
