1966 Dodge Charger: The Fastback That Brought the Street Hemi Home

The first Charger was born beside a boycott. Dodge's heritage history records that in 1965 NASCAR banned the Hemi because it did not meet new rules requiring engines to be available for series production, and that Chrysler sat out the racing season in protest. Until then the 426 Hemi had been a competition engine: Newhardt and Holmstrom count 101 strictly-for-racing Hemi Coronets for 1965. The way back to the racetrack ran through the showroom. For 1966 Chrysler put a street version of the Hemi on the regular option list, and on January 1, 1966, Dodge introduced a new car that offered it at the top of its engine list: the Charger, a fastback with its own body on the Coronet chassis.^1,2

The shape had been waiting for some time. Ate Up With Motor traces it to a styling study by designer Carl Cameron in the summer of 1963, and says the car was rushed into production to compete with the Ford Mustang. What reached showrooms was what Ate Up calls a specialty car. Dodge's heritage history calls it the brand's first production fastback and describes an interior with four bucket seats and a full-length centre console; Ate Up adds full instrumentation and folding rear seats. The factory brochure built the car's identity around the fastback and that four-seat interior.^3,1

The engine list ran from sensible to spectacular. Dodge's heritage account gives a 230 hp 318 V-8 as standard, with a 265 hp 361 and a 325 hp 383 above it, and at the top the 426 Street Hemi, rated at 425 hp and 490 lb-ft. Those are period gross ratings as Dodge now reports them, not chassis measurements. The Hemi was not a casual choice: Ate Up With Motor puts its price at $877. The Charger's own base price is not settled, since two books print different figures without a basis, so it remains an open question rather than a guess.^1,3

The first model year was short, and it was the Charger's best until the redesign. Automotive Industries, Mueller and Langworth all give 37,344 Chargers for 1966, every one a fastback. The Hemi was a rarity inside that total. Newhardt and Holmstrom count 468 Hemi Chargers, 1.2 percent of the year's buyers, and Mueller splits them into 250 four-speeds and 218 TorqueFlite automatics. Mueller and Glatch's later book repeats the 468. For the other engines no documented count exists: nobody has yet published a sourced split of 318, 361 and 383 cars for 1966, so the story of the other 98.8 percent of Chargers has to be told without numbers.^4,5,6,2,7,8

Not every history agrees on the Hemi cars. Ate Up With Motor prints 438 Hemi Chargers for 1966 and describes the four-speed as mandatory with the engine. Both claims run against the production tables, which count 468 cars and 218 of them with an automatic. The automatic split matters more than the 30-car difference in the total. If Mueller's figures are right, almost half of the first Street Hemi Chargers, 47 percent, were ordered with TorqueFlite, evidence that Chrysler's racing engine was being ordered as a road car. NASCAR's series-production rule required ordinary customers to be able to buy the engine; the automatic Hemi Chargers show that some of them did.^3,7,1

On the track the fastback proved a mixed blessing. Ate Up With Motor reports that the Charger suffered from excessive lift at speed and that a rear-deck spoiler was added at the last minute to steady it. The result still counted. According to the same history, David Pearson drove a Charger to the 1966 NASCAR Grand National championship, although Ford took the manufacturers' title. The pattern would repeat itself for years: a Charger shape chosen for the showroom that had to be corrected for the superspeedway, and a correction that then became part of the car's identity. The 1969 Charger 500 and Daytona were, in that sense, later chapters of a story that began with the 1966 spoiler.³

In the showroom the Charger never became the Mustang fighter its rushed launch suggested. Ate Up With Motor counts 53,132 Chargers across 1966 and 1967, a little under 5 percent of Dodge's volume, against nearly 180,000 GTOs and more than a million Mustangs in the same two years. The production tables tell the same story in sharper form. Mueller gives 15,788 Chargers for 1967, and with the 37,344 of 1966 that makes exactly the site's two-year total. The fall from the first year to the second was 58 percent. Whatever its merits, the first Charger was a minor seller by the standards of the cars it was measured against.^3,7,5

The second year made the first one look better. For 1967 Dodge carried the fastback over with small front-fender turn indicators, a new vinyl-roof option and newly mandated safety equipment, including a collapsible steering column and a dual-circuit master cylinder. Production fell to 15,788, of which Mueller and Glatch count 14,666 as domestic. The Hemi fell harder still, from 468 cars to 117 by Mueller and Glatch's count, or 118 by Gunnell's. Meanwhile a new engine found more buyers than the Hemi ever had in the Charger: Mueller and Glatch record 660 Chargers with the 440 Magnum in its first year. That shift, from the exotic racing engine to the big, simple wedge, pointed directly at the car Dodge would build next.^1,8,9

What the first Charger did establish was a place in the lineup for a Dodge that led with style and backed it with the biggest engine Chrysler would sell. That combination outlived the fastback. Dodge replaced it for 1968 with the double-diamond body and an R/T built around the 440, and Ate Up With Motor reports 96,108 sold that year, nearly double the first generation's two-year total. The Street Hemi stayed on the Charger's option list through 1971, which Dodge's heritage history describes as the last year a buyer could order a factory Hemi Charger. The 468 Hemi cars of 1966 were the first of that line: the kind of showroom production NASCAR had demanded before it would let the engine race.^3,1,2