Altered Wheelbases: Detroit Starts Moving the Axles
When Better Traction Meant Moving Half the Car Forward
By 1964 Chrysler had a problem most racers would have been delighted to inherit. The 426 Hemi could make more power than the tires knew what to do with, which meant another trip to the engine shop mostly produced a more expensive cloud of tire smoke.
Waiting for better slicks was one possibility. Race departments have never been especially gifted at waiting.
Another possibility was to start moving the car around the tires.
Dick Landy had already been experimenting with that idea. Chrysler was about to demonstrate what happens when Detroit takes a useful little racing trick and gives it an engineering budget.
A Few Inches Seemed to Help
Landy had been working with wheelbase and weight transfer before Chrysler built the famous 1965 cars. Under acceleration, weight moves rearward, so shifting more of the car’s existing weight toward the rear axle gives the slicks more help when the throttle opens.
Landy moved the rear axle forward, found something useful, and kept going. The front wheels moved too, and by late 1964 his Dodge had begun looking noticeably different from anything Dodge was offering respectable civilians.
It also left considerably harder.
That was the part Chrysler noticed.
Detroit Took the Idea and Lost All Restraint
For 1965, Chrysler prepared Dodge Coronets and Plymouth Belvederes for A/FX competition. Nobody was talking about nudging an axle an inch and hoping the inspector had forgotten his tape measure.
The rear axle moved forward 15 inches. The front suspension moved forward 10.
Now the tires were occupying places the original fenders had never expected to see them, the wheelbase was shorter and roughly 56 percent of the car’s weight sat over the rear tires. Weight transfer had stopped being something an engineer explained on a blackboard.
You could see it from the parking lot.
The Rear Seat Was Having a Bad Year
Moving an axle forward fifteen inches takes more commitment than drilling another spring-perch hole. Floors had to be cut, wheelhouses relocated, quarter-panel openings changed and rear suspension pieces moved along with the axle. Parts that had previously lived happily around the trunk suddenly found themselves much closer to the back seat.
The front received similar surgery. Special torsion bars and relocated structure put the front wheels ten inches closer to the bumper, leaving the finished car with the unsettling appearance of somebody sliding both axles forward while forgetting to move the body with them.
Which, stripped of the engineering language, was fairly close to what Chrysler had done.
Then Chrysler Put the Rest of the Car on a Diet
There was no point moving useful weight toward the slicks while hauling unnecessary weight everywhere else. Fiberglass replaced steel in various body pieces, thinner windows saved more pounds and the interiors became increasingly optimistic interpretations of passenger accommodations.
Some bodies received acid-dipping treatment to remove still more steel. Then the 426 Race Hemi went under the hood, first with dual four-barrels and later, in some cars, with Hilborn fuel injection.
Chrysler now had enormous horsepower, less automobile and most of the useful weight sitting where the rear tires could do something with it.
This was called Factory Experimental.
The experiment seemed to be determining how much factory automobile could be rearranged before somebody finally objected.
Dick Landy Was Already Waiting
Landy’s 1965 Dodge Coronet became one of the cars everybody remembers: white body, red interior, 426 Hemi, front wheels shoved toward the bumper and rear wheels sitting far enough forward to make the quarter panels look confused.
The odd proportions were not there for decoration. When Landy opened the throttle, the car left hard and wheelstands came naturally because the whole purpose of moving the axles was to make the rear tires carry more useful load during acceleration.
The earlier cars had horsepower.
These cars had figured out how to use more of it.
NHRA Didn’t Need a Tape Measure
Some rulebook arguments begin with a suspicious inspector, a flashlight and three hours of disassembly. Chrysler’s altered-wheelbase cars saved everybody the trouble.
They looked wrong from fifty feet away.
The rear tires had moved more than a foot, so nobody was going to blame production tolerances or claim the assembly line had experienced a particularly adventurous Friday afternoon. NHRA did not accept the radical cars as ordinary A/FX machinery.
That could have killed the idea.
Instead, it sent the cars someplace with a much simpler rulebook.
The Promoters Had Four Questions
Match-race promoters cared less about where Chrysler had originally intended the rear axle to live. Their inspection procedure was closer to this: will people buy tickets, will the cars make noise, will they run hard and is there a reasonable chance somebody will put the front tires in the air?
The altered-wheelbase cars passed beautifully.
Dick Landy, Sox & Martin, Butch Leal, the Ramchargers, Golden Commandos, Color Me Gone and other Hemi-powered Dodges and Plymouths began traveling the country looking strange, launching hard and giving spectators exactly what they had paid to see.
NHRA might have had classification problems.
The grandstands did not.
Then Somebody Added Fuel
This was where the idea stopped behaving itself. If the relocated axles helped a carbureted Hemi use its power, they worked just as well when the engine became considerably less civilized.
Fuel injection arrived. Gasoline gave way to nitromethane, elapsed times dropped into the nines and speeds climbed past 140 mph. Before long, superchargers began appearing too.
At that point, arguing over whether the axle was still in the proper production location had become almost quaint. The factory experimental car was disappearing rapidly underneath the race car being built on top of it.
They Looked Funny
The altered-wheelbase cars still wore recognizable production bodies. You could identify the Dodge or Plymouth, the doors still opened and enough familiar sheet metal remained to remind everybody where the thing had started.
But the proportions were wrong. The wheels were wrong, the stance was wrong and the whole car looked as though somebody had taken a perfectly good production drawing and bumped the drafting table halfway through.
Compared with conventional Super Stock cars, they looked funny.
The description stuck.
Funny cars.
Before long, Funny Car would describe an entire class of increasingly specialized drag machines, long after the wheels had returned to locations that looked less likely to upset a body-shop man.
The Factory Had Started Something It Couldn’t Stop
The escalation happened remarkably quickly. Move an axle a little and traction improves, so move it farther. Move the front too, lighten the body and add fuel injection. Once nitro and blowers enter the discussion, the usefulness of dragging a modified production chassis underneath everything begins to deserve serious reconsideration.
By 1966, purpose-built tube chassis and lightweight bodies were beginning to supply the answer.
The altered-wheelbase factory cars had helped create their own replacement. Chrysler had started by trying to make a production-based Hemi car hook harder and ended up helping drag racing discover that the production car itself was becoming optional.
All Because the Tires Needed Help
That is the best part of the whole progression. Chrysler did not begin with a conference-room plan to invent Funny Car. It began with a much simpler irritation: the Hemi was making more power than the tires could use.
Landy and others had shown that moving the axles helped, so Chrysler took the idea to the sort of logical conclusion only a factory race program could call logical. Rear axle forward fifteen inches, front wheels forward ten, more useful weight over the slicks and enough Hemi under the hood to justify all the cutting.
The cars launched harder. The crowds loved them. NHRA had to figure out where to put them.
And once Detroit discovered it was perfectly willing to move the axles to make a “stock” car work better, the word stock was already in serious trouble.