1969 AMC AMX: Hurst Super Stocks, Big Bad Paint and a Total Nobody Can Pin Down

Before Hurst built a single Super Stock AMX, Shirley Shahan and her husband and crew chief, H.L. Shahan, built the prototype themselves. Mac's Motor City Garage reports that their mule ran in the “11-seconds-flat zone” at better than 120 mph. Shahan, known as the Drag-On Lady, then took an AMX to the U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis and won class honors on its first trip there. That was a new kind of result for American Motors, a company whose showroom reputation had been built on sensible Ramblers. The AMX was in its second model year, and 1969 was the year AMC took its short two-seater to the drag strip, painted it in loud colors and sold more of them than it ever would again.¹

Mac's Motor City Garage describes the goal as shedding a “granny-car image” and reaching the young performance buyer. The tool was a factory drag car. Hurst Performance had done the same job for Chrysler in 1968 with the Dodge Dart and Plymouth Barracuda super stockers. At its Detroit facility it converted 52 Frost White production AMXs into racers legal for NHRA Super Stock. The SS/AMX registry numbers those Hurst cars #1 through #52 and lists non-Hurst cars separately. Mac's counts 53 when the Shahan-built prototype is included, and JavelinAMX.com prints “53 (?).” Read carefully, 52 and 53 are two scopes, Hurst-built cars and all cars including the prototype, not two competing counts of the same thing.^1,2,3

The conversion went far past a hot street car. According to Mac's, the 390 was built with 12.3:1 compression, Crane-modified heads, an Edelbrock cross-ram intake and two Holley 650-cfm four-barrels, behind a Borg-Warner four-speed and a 4.44:1 Twin-Grip axle, at a quoted curb weight of 3,050 pounds. AMC advertised 340 horsepower. NHRA refactored the engine to 420, so the cars were classed first in SS/E and later in SS/D and SS/C, and Mac's says they set and reset SS/E records. The factory price was $5,994, and Street Muscle adds that the car came without a warranty. About 40 survive by both articles' counts, and the registry's index lists 39.^1,2

The street AMX changed little. AMC's 1969 full-line brochure presented it as its own two-seat model beside the Javelin and the SC/Rambler, with the 343 at 280 horsepower and 365 lb-ft and the 390 at 315 horsepower and 425 lb-ft, both available with a four-speed. The 290 remained the base V8. OldRide's table gives body 6939-7 a factory price of $3,297, against the $3,245 Old Cars Weekly reports for 1968; neither source states what the price includes. The Go Package carried over for 343 and 390 cars: dual exhaust, power disc brakes, redline tires, Twin-Grip, the handling package, heavy-duty cooling and over-the-top stripes. Its $5,994 price put the Super Stock AMX in a different world from the showroom car.^4,5,6,1

How many AMXs did Kenosha build for 1969? The honest answer is two numbers. Planet Houston AMX's engine-and-transmission table, repeated by JavelinAMX.com, gives 8,293. The same site's weekly production series, credited to Linn Barton, ends at 8,317, which is 24 cars more. The two figures do not come from separate investigations, and neither has been traced to an AMC production report. The arithmetic suggests where the gap sits. The option table's transmission rows, 5,082 four-speeds and 3,235 automatics, add up to 8,317, the weekly figure. The engine table's six cells add up to 8,293. The two tables were compiled on different bases, and the source does not reconcile them.^7,8,3

A second, smaller dispute sits inside the engine table itself. Planet Houston AMX gives 3,620 390 four-speeds for 1969, while a widely read Wikipedia copy of the table prints 3,690. The 3,620 figure is the one that fits the table's own 1969 total and its three-year 390 four-speed total of 7,364, so it leads here. Taking 8,293 as the denominator, the 390 went into 5,803 cars (3,620 four-speeds and 2,183 automatics), about 70 percent. The 343 accounted for 1,572 and the 290 for just 918. The buyer mix also swung toward the clutch: four-speeds took 5,082 of the 8,293 cars, roughly 61 percent, after automatics had outnumbered them in 1968.^7,9

The same compilation shows how the cars were equipped. Power front disc brakes went on 6,276 cars and Twin-Grip on 6,569, both roughly three-quarters or more of an 8,293-car year. Stripes appeared on 6,159 and Rally wheels on 4,941. Air conditioning went on 1,742, and quick-ratio steering on 912. Leather was now offered in charcoal and saddle, and the counts are 1,377 charcoal-leather and 1,525 saddle-leather interiors. The compiler warns that dealers could install many options, and that the Go Package does not appear in the VIN or on the door tag. Only a window sticker, dealer order form or build sheet proves a Go Package car, whatever its hood stripes say.^7,6

Mid-year, AMC made the AMX impossible to miss. The Big Bad colors, a vivid blue, green and orange, reached the two-seater, and Planet Houston AMX counts 195 blue, 284 green and 283 orange 1969 AMXs. JavelinAMX.com agrees on green and orange but gives 176 blue, and it says its Big Bad figures include the California 500 cars. Both counts are shown. Planet Houston AMX also states that no factory breakdown of regular-color production exists. The Big Bad numbers are therefore the only color data for the year, and they come from one enthusiast lineage. Even on the most generous reading, fewer than one 1969 AMX in ten wore a Big Bad color.^7,3

Other famous 1969 AMX stories are left out because their counts rest on a single encyclopedia article. These include a California dealer special and a group of Pikes Peak pace cars, whose numbers disagree even within that article. What the documented record supports is enough. In 1969 AMC sold an AMX that buyers most often ordered with the 390 and a four-speed, and it put 52 Hurst-converted cars into Super Stock drag racing at $5,994 apiece. Shirley Shahan carried one to class honors at Indianapolis. In little more than a year, the two-seater had gone from a record-breaking image car to a class winner at the U.S. Nationals.^9,7,1

It was also the peak. Whether the year's total is 8,293 or 8,317, 1969 is the largest of the three two-seat years. The engine-and-transmission table gives 6,725 for the half-year 1968 run and 4,116 for 1970. The 52 Hurst cars are counted inside the 1969 total, not on top of it. Today the Super Stock AMXs are among the most carefully tracked AMCs, numbered one by one in a registry, while the ordinary cars' paint colors were never broken out at all. That contrast is the lesson of the year's production record: the rarest cars are the best documented, and the most common figure, the model-year total, is the one still in dispute.^7,8,2