1962 Dodge Dart and Polara 500: The Year Dodge Named an Engine After Its Weekend Racers

The 1962 Dodge that the Ramchargers took delivery of was ordered the way the club wanted it: white paint, red interior, and, in the team's own telling, the first Dodge Super Stock car ever built. When the members opened the hood they found orange valve covers carrying decals that read RAMCHARGER 413. Dodge had put the name of a club of young Chrysler engineers who raced on their own time onto its most powerful passenger-car engine. The club's history is not shy about what that meant to them. Its verdict on the decals is three words long: "What an honor."^1,2

The Ramchargers were not a factory team, and NHRA's history is careful to say so. National Dragster editor Phil Burgess describes a confederation of individuals that formed an NHRA-sanctioned hot rod club in 1958 and 1959, and he stresses that it stayed free-standing, financially and operationally, from Chrysler even while its members' day jobs came to involve the corporation's race development. The roster reads like an engineering department after hours: Tom Hoover, later called the father of the 426 Hemi; Dan Mancini on carburetion and the dynamometer; Dick Maxwell, who built the club's first car; and drivers Jim Thornton, Herman Moser and Mike Buckel.³

That first car, the High and Mighty, was a 1949 Plymouth business coupe with a 354 Hemi, and NHRA credits it with C/Altered records of 109.75 mph and 12.62 seconds over its two seasons. By 1962 the club's attention had moved to Dodge's new showroom car, and the timing was good. Dodge had made what Over-Drive calls a surprise move for 1962, cutting the wheelbase of its standard line from 118 inches to 116 and taking almost 150 pounds out of the average car. The Dart, Dart 330, Dart 440 and Polara 500 all shared that shorter chassis, which put a big-block engine into a noticeably lighter package than the year before.^3,2

The ladder of engines Dodge offered on that chassis shows how far up the new option sat. The Polara 500, the line's sporting flagship with bucket seats, carpeting and dual exhausts, came standard with a 361-cubic-inch V8 rated at 305 horsepower. Above it the fact sheet lists 383s at 330 and 335 horsepower and ordinary 413s at 365 and 385. The Ramcharger 413 replaced the older high-output 413 and 383 long- and short-ram engines. Its bore and stroke were 4.1875 by 3.75 inches, and it breathed through an integral 15-inch short-ram intake carrying two Carter four-barrels, AFB-2903S as standard or AFB-3447S as an option.²

Dodge published two ratings. On 11.0:1 compression the Ramcharger 413 was listed at 410 horsepower at 5,400 rpm; on 13.5:1 it was listed at 420. These are Dodge's advertised figures, not dynamometer readings from any particular engine, and the fact sheet does not state the rating basis. The high-compression version carried a telling bureaucratic history: Over-Drive notes that it was first listed as dealer installed and later amended to optional. The 410-horsepower engine was a $400 option. Plymouth sold its twin, the Super Stock 413, on the same 116-inch-wheelbase platform with the same two ratings at $375, so the two divisions were offering one engineering answer under two names.^2,4

The competition it was built to meet was already on the strip. NHRA's account of the 1961 season reproduces Pontiac's offer of a 421-cubic-inch high-performance engine to qualified drivers and a National Dragster report of an August 1961 Pomona meet in which Hayden Proffitt, in Mickey Thompson's Pontiac, beat Don Nicholson's 409 Chevrolet in the Super Stock final. By the spring of 1962 Nicholson was the Winternationals champion. NHRA records that the first public test of the 413 Max Wedge was a best-of-five match race at Detroit Dragway between the Ramchargers' Dart and Nicholson's 409, and it states plainly that the contest did not end in Dodge's favor.^5,6

The Winternationals did deliver a Dodge wedge headline, but not in a sedan. NHRA credits Jim Nelson's Dragmaster Dart, a dragster powered by a supercharged 413, with the first major win for a Dodge wedge-headed engine in any dragster. The Dragmaster connection had its own paper trail: NHRA, citing Hot Rod, says Dodge asked Wally Parks in 1961 whom to support on the West Coast, and that truckloads of engines, transmissions and rear ends then went to the Carlsbad shop, enough to need a second 6,000-square-foot building. Nelson's car and the Ramchargers' Dart shared an engine family and nothing else; one was a blown dragster, the other a showroom sedan.⁶

The Ramchargers' own account of the season is a development diary. The car arrived with a long-ram manifold because, the club says, the cross-ram manifold that later Max Wedge lightweights wore was not yet finished; it got one from Chrysler when they became available. Meanwhile the team swapped in the shortened long-ram pieces it had used on its 1961 car, having found they suited the manual transmission better. The planned debut at the February 1962 Winternationals was delayed by rain, so Buckel took his wife on an overdue honeymoon in the new Dart, found another track, and, by the club's account, ran the first 12-second pass ever made by a Super Stock car.¹

That 12-second claim comes from the team, and no timing slip, track name or date accompanies it, so it stands as the Ramchargers' record of their own car rather than an NHRA result. The same history is candid about what went wrong. Traction problems and failures of the Borg-Warner three-speed manual plagued the car through the first half of 1962, and the team replaced it with a TorqueFlite automatic, after which, the club says, the Dart was faster and easier to drive. The automatic had been on Dodge's list from the start: the specifications give the TorqueFlite 2.45, 1.45 and 1.00 ratios, 3.91 gearing for manual-transmission 413 cars, and dealer ratios from 2.76 to 6.17.^1,2

The Stock Eliminator trophy at the Nationals went to Chevrolet. NHRA's memorial list for Hayden Proffitt records that his 1962 Bel Air 409 won Stock Eliminator at the U.S. Nationals, the only NHRA national event title of his career. For Dodge the harder question is how many buyers followed the Ramchargers' lead. No Dodge document yet located gives a count of 1962 cars built with the Ramcharger 413. Over-Drive's fact sheet links a 1962 Dodge production-figure document that could not be read, and the Plymouth sheet's body-style totals, such as 5,086 Belvedere hardtops and 4,039 Sport Fury hardtops, count every engine rather than the Super Stock option. The number stays unknown.^7,2,4

What 1962 led to is better documented than what it produced. A Chrysler technical bulletin dated June 13, 1963 opens by presenting the 426 as the successor to the 1962 413 programs, naming them Ramcharger for Dodge and Super Stock for Plymouth. At the 1963 Nationals Herman Moser won Stock in the club's Max Wedge Dart, and Buckel later recalled that NHRA inspected the engine every night and then sealed it. Hoover went on to be remembered as the father of the 426 Hemi. The weekend club whose name went onto a Dodge valve cover in 1962 had become the people Chrysler's racing engines were built around.^8,3