1963 Plymouth Super Stock 426: Built to a 427-Inch Rule, Raced by the Men Who Built It

Plymouth's factory drag racers arrived at the NHRA Winternationals in February 1963 with a new engine. Mac's Motor City Garage describes the Golden Commandos as the factory Plymouth team, set up as a counterpart to Dodge's Ramchargers, led by engineer Ray Kobe and made up mainly of Chrysler engineering mechanics and technicians. The article says they came out of nowhere to finish runner-up at that meet. In the same season, Dragzine reports, Tom Grove's Melrose Missile, a 426-powered 1963 Savoy named for Melrose Motors of Oakland, California, won the Super Stock class at the Winternationals with a three-speed manual. The two results belong to different entries and are kept apart.^1,2

The engine's size was set by a rule. Engine Labs reports that for 1963 NHRA limited factory Super Stock displacement to 427.2 cubic inches, which is why Chrysler's maximum-performance wedge grew from 413 to 426 rather than to anything larger. Chrysler's technical bulletin dated June 13, 1963 presents the 426 as the successor to the 1962 413-cubic-inch Plymouth Super Stock and Dodge Ramcharger programs, keeping the two marque names separate even while describing one engineering development. On the Plymouth side, the option carried the name Super Stock 426 in Over-Drive's compilation of the year's engines.^3,4,5

Plymouth needed the attention. Mac's records that the corporation's volume division had fallen from third to eighth in U.S. sales after the 1961 and 1962 models, cars Virgil Exner himself had called plucked chickens. Exner began the 1963 overhaul, and Elwood Engel, arriving as design vice president, changed little: a wider stance, a deck three inches longer and a shoulder line running front to rear. Over-Drive keeps the 116-inch wheelbase and describes a flat roof, a flatter rear deck and a square front. Mac's credits a performance program under Chrysler engineer Tom Hoover with moving Plymouth and Dodge from mid-field toward the front in NASCAR and drag racing.^1,5

The Super Stock 426 itself was a short-ram engine. Over-Drive lists two Carter four-barrels on an integral 15-inch ram intake, mechanical lifters and a camshaft with 300 degrees of duration, 75 degrees of overlap and 0.509-inch lift. On 11.0:1 compression it was rated at 415 horsepower at 5,600 rpm and 470 lb-ft at 4,400 rpm; on 13.5:1 it was rated at 425 horsepower at 5,600 rpm and 480 lb-ft at 4,400. These are manufacturer-published ratings whose basis the fact sheet does not state, and at 425 horsepower from 426 cubic inches the high-compression engine sat just under one horsepower per cubic inch on paper.⁵

The engine also changed during the year, and the sources describe the change differently. Over-Drive says Stage II versions arrived with improved cylinder heads, exhaust duration raised to 308 degrees and lift to 0.520 inch, and the same horsepower ratings. It adds that in June 1963 Plymouth announced a Super Stock wedge-head 426-II for supervised drag racing and stock-car racing, and that cars with it finished first and second in USAC competition. Engine Labs, writing about the 1963 engines, says both compression versions were called Stage II and that there was no Stage I. Neither source prints the factory release that would settle the naming.^5,3

A buyer could put the engine in almost any full-size Plymouth. MaxWedge.com says the 1963 package was available in every intermediate B-body Plymouth, Savoy, Belvedere, Fury and Sport Fury alike, and Over-Drive singles out the lighter Belvedere two-door hardtop. The racers chose the plainest car and lightened it further. Engine Labs describes a Plymouth Savoy with lightweight aluminum front bodywork, a hood scoop and a minimal interior, and Dragzine lists an aluminum front bumper and hood and factory hood scoops on the Melrose Missile. None of the sources states how much weight the aluminum parts saved.^6,5,3,2

The gearboxes tell the calendar of the year. Over-Drive lists the 426 with a three-speed manual and a 3.91 standard axle, or the TorqueFlite automatic, and says Chrysler's own four-speed, geared 2.66, 1.91, 1.39 and 1.00 with a 3.55 standard axle, arrived only in May 1963. Grove's Winternationals class win came with the three-speed, months before a four-speed could be ordered. Dragzine says the Melrose team also ran a push-button TorqueFlite car in Super Stock Automatic that season, driven by Charlie Di Bari, so the same dealer campaigned both transmissions while the corporation was still finishing its manual gearbox.^5,2

How many Plymouths got the engine has not been found in any published source. Over-Drive gives 244,395 Plymouths for 1963, 158,612 of them with V8s, or about 65 percent, and prints body counts for the host series: 56,313 Savoy four-door sedans, 54,929 Belvedere four-door sedans, 31,891 Fury four-door sedans, 11,483 Sport Fury hardtops and 3,836 Sport Fury convertibles. Every one of those counts covers all engines. Two-door sedan counts for the Savoy and Belvedere were not captured, and Darrell L. Davis's Max Wedge serial-number work, which may hold totals by body, has not been inspected. The denominator is known; the numerator is not.⁵

The racing season did not end with a Plymouth on top at the biggest meet. Mac's says the Golden Commandos set low elapsed time at the U.S. Nationals in September and claimed the track record at Detroit Dragway, the Ramchargers' home track. But NHRA's Ramchargers retrospective identifies Herman Moser as the Stock winner at the 1963 Nationals in a Max Wedge Dodge, and a participant there recalls officials repeatedly inspecting and sealing the engine. Low elapsed time and the eliminator title were separate honors, and in 1963 the corporation's two factory-connected teams divided them. Dragzine credits the Melrose cars with 26 track records over their two seasons.^1,7,2

The team rivalry had a social edge that the cars did not. Mac's describes the Golden Commandos as mainly mechanics and technicians and calls the contest with the engineer-heavy Ramchargers a light-hearted blue-collar versus white-collar rivalry. NHRA's history of the Ramchargers stresses that the club remained financially and operationally independent of Chrysler even though several members held engineering jobs connected to the corporation's race program. Both groups drove the same corporate engine family, and both show how a factory program could run through people whose day jobs and weekend racing overlapped without becoming one organization.^1,7

The 426 wedge's replacement was already under way before the 1963 season began. NHRA's history of the Race Hemi says that in December 1962 Bill Weertman and a small engineering group were assigned to prepare a new 426-cubic-inch engine for the 1964 Winternationals and Daytona 500, and it places Hoover on that work after his Max Wedge and Ramchargers experience. The shared displacement makes the two easy to confuse, but the Race Hemi was a different engine with a different combustion chamber. The Melrose Missile raced on into 1964, and Dragzine says Grove retired it in 1965 when he moved to Ford.^8,2