Hemi Powered Dodge Trucks: Not What You Think
When I was a kid growing up in the seventies and eighties, I dreamed of working at the Chrysler proving grounds. I figured that’s where I’d get a look at tomorrow’s cars today and maybe even come in contact with some fascinating dead end projects before they got fed to the crusher. Much of this stems from a stack of car magazines I found in 1974. I was 10 years old at the time but inside these musty back issues from the sixties I was drawn especially to a story showing a 1965 Dodge Coronet hardtop with a Street Hemi under the hood.
The magazine was Hi-Performance CARS, one of the New York based Magnum-Royal titles, and there’s the editor, Martyn L. Schorr, standing with this awesome engineering prototype at the Chelsea, Michigan proving grounds. In case you are rusty on your Hemi history, you’ll need to know that the Street Hemi made its public debut in 1966 beneath the hoods of the freshly re-styled Dodge and Plymouth B-bodies. While the cross-rammed Race Hemi was available in 1964 and 1965 B-bodies, the Street Hemi, with its dual in-line Carter AFB carburetors was not. As far as the public was concerned, in 1965 the Street Hemi hadn’t been invented yet.
And yet there’s Marty standing in front of this hybrid, a puddle of coolant on the tarmac telling of possible overheating problems. Marty’s published accounts describe how the combination was a way for Chrysler engineers to put real-world street miles on the 426 Street Hemi package - without revealing the totally restyled 1966 B-body to the public months before its official introduction. This tactic is hardly new. Several months ago I wrote in this column how I spotted a weird stretched Chrysler LH platform mule car on LaBrea Avenue in Los Angeles. I noticed the fact it had rear wheel drive and now we know it was an LX mule. Cool stuff often hides in plain sight.
I never did get that job at Chelsea but later, during my years as tech editor at Hot Rod magazine I got involved with a variation on the factory prototype / engineering mule theme. Dodge – particularly the truck division - had a solid relationship with the Petersen / EMAP / Primedia publishing empire and was spending huge advertising bucks. As technical editor of Hot Rod magazine, I was fortunate enough to be part of the team that planned and executed no less than two Hemi powered Dodge pickup trucks.
You might ask, what’s the big deal? There are Hemi powered Dodge pickup trucks on every street corner these days. But not in 1998, when the 2003 5.7L Hemi Magnum was still five years away from the show room. The Hemi trucks we built as Hot Rod magazine project vehicles packed real Hemi power - of the old school 426 variety. The first of the pair was a 426 Hemi powered Dakota Quad Cab dubbed the Hot Rod Hemi.It was built for us by Troy Trepanier in 1998, the debut year for the Dakota Quad Cab body style and Mopar Performance 426 crate Hemi program – a nice synergy. The Dodge marketing people and our ad staff figured a Hemi-urged Quad Cab magazine project vehicle would fan the flames of desire in every direction. They were right.
By the way, there was an earlier Hot Rod- Trepanier – Dodge project car collaboration that set the stage for the Hemi Dakota. It was the Dodge Stratus Fear. In the planning stages, there was talk of converting the bright red two-door Stratus coupe to rear wheel drive and sticking it full of prototype MP crate 426 Hemi. Things got delayed, deadlines loomed and the end result was a warmed over front-drive stocker with V6 power. But Troy did his best to give the illusion that the car was more than it turned out to be. He gave it a nose down rake, big rear skins and a faux Shaker hood. The finished car was pretty decent, but not the Hemi screamer we all initially envisioned. It was given away as a magazine promotion to some guy in the northwest who somehow lost the keys and wouldn’t stop complaining about the hidden door release solenoids. The last time I saw this car was in the 2005 Lindsay Lohan “Herbie: Fully Loaded” movie remake where it’s used as a prop in a garage scene.
