Like all Hemi-powered cars, the mandated 15” wheels precluded the use of the stylized Magnum 500s, which were 14” size, The body lines were not altered from stock when view from the side.
GM was officially out of racing, but Ford and Chrysler were going full at it, and one of the main battle grounds was the NASCAR tracks like Daytona. Chrysler knew how to build horsepower, but had already begun looking at aerodynamic advantages as well, especially after NASCAR allowed the Ford 427s a twin four-barrel setup when the SOHC motor never reached fruition. The Special Vehicles Group was the fertile soil for the swoopy effort, led by Larry Rathgeb and staffed by former aerospace engineers like Bob Marcell and John Pointer. The redesigned 1968 Charger, the pride of Bill Brownlie and widely heralded in the national press, may have looked good, but it had some real problems on the NASCAR superspeedways.
 Only two engines were available in the Charger 500 – the 440 Magnum was standard, and the 426 Hemi was an extra-cost option. |
The Brownlie design team had deeply inset the grill several inches into the front of the car. It looked cool, but at 160+, it was like a giant air well to nowhere – the wind got caught against the vertical surfaces in the ‘box’ and had no place to go. Even the he-man NASCAR guys of the 1960s were shook up by it. The rear backlight was also a problem; the window was angled down inside two ridges coming down off the roofline to the body, which had allowed for a larger trunk opening and gave the car a distinct custom edge. Again, at speed, the same window wanted to pull the back wheels up off the ground as wind rose straight up from the glass. This was the reason why Richard Petty’s Road Runner, which didn’t ‘look’ nearly as fast, was the only Mopar that could keep up with Ford’s redesigned Torino and the Mercury Cyclone - both which featured an almost flush grille and fastback styling.
By mid-1968, Rathgeb’s crew had spent $100,000 to do their first group of full-size vehicle tests at Lockheed’s wind tunnel in Atlanta, after already prototyping the ideas at the Wichita State University’s smaller wind tunnel with 3/8-scale models. The time was used to find the solutions to the Charger’s problems as well as ascertain what happened in the high-speed bumper-to-bumper draft. The engineers came up with two solutions – a redesigned
 The console-mounted automatic shifter had a faux wood handle in 1969; it could be used manually if the driver was deft at keeping it in gear. The SlapStik that debuted the following year was more forgiving. |
grill that was flush with the leading edge of the car, and a rear window and plug that made the car almost a true fastback. The shortened decklid was not overly practical, which is why the original buyer of the Wellborn’s car probably wanted the luggage rack, and why that rack was never installed.
It was now only months before the introduction of the 1969 models; what would be the best way to execute the cars? Since doing the 1967 drag cars, the factory had been farming work out when building short runs of special cars to not have the problems associated with slowed-down assembly lines and union labor. Creative Industries, a subcontractor in the Detroit area, would do the work to create Charger 500s out of standard R/T models. The grill itself was already on the parts list; it was the same version used on the 1968 Coronet, with two trim rings added around the headlights. The sheetmetal itself was unchanged. A special 500 emblem was added to this in place of the Charger symbol found on non-R/T models.