In 1957, stock car racing was big business and getting bigger. Manufacturers saw gold at the finish line....after all, if their cars won races, spectators would  buy from them and  shun the losers. The race was on, in more ways than one.

The factories put together special racing teams and began developing engines for the hot new sport. Factory advertising  now stressed speed and horsepower. Painted on the hood of every race car was the horsepower figure for what was under the hood; these numbers were provided by  the factory, and were not exactly truthful. The wild horsepower claims got so out of hand  that Nascar made a rule requiring  the auto makers to provide honest numbers.

In order to get the edge on their competitors, car makers began offering fuel injected engines, multiple carbureted engines, and superchargers. All of this was installed on engines that were already  disproportionately powerful for everyday use.  All this stuff was  legal for Nascar since the public could buy it from their dealers.  Chrysler was the first to really push the envelope with the C300 in 1955; now John Q. Public could have a dual quad hemi that would do 140 mph in stock trim. Others followed, and the scenario turned dangerous.

Despite Wally Parks' earlier formation of the NHRA in 1951, which gave racers a legitimate forum, illegal street racing was becoming a problem across America. Previously reserved for back yard hot rodders and juvenile delinquents who had customized, "souped up" cars, the dangerous practice now attracted businessmen, teachers, and yes, even a few housewives like Shirley Muldowney. A lot of people discovered the exhilaration of brutal acceleration and street racing for money, and by 1957 they started ordering crazy street machines like the 300, D500, fuel injected Corvette,  Plymouth Fury, supercharged Thunderbird, J2 Oldsmobile, and DeSoto Adventurer. Those who had a little more ingenuity and mechanical ability simply ordered the new powerful engines (or the components) and installed them in older, lighter cars.

Unfortunately, most of these new generation racers didn't know what they were doing. Also, technology hadn't quite kept up to the horsepower race, and the failure of other components on these cars led to catastrophic accidents.  Standard tires would not take this kind of speed, and the average idiot who thought it would be cute to do 130 on the interstate had no clue as to what kind of tires he should order. Cheap 2 ply bias tires were often standard equipment, not the exotic Goodyear Blue Streaks 300s used. When these cheaper tires blew out at terminal velocity, nobody walked away. I saw a Chevrolet which had launched itself about 30 feet into the air, coming to rest in a tree on the Merritt Parkway one time as a result of a high speed blowout. Everybody in the car died.

Accidents skyrocketed, and quite a few of the would be drag racers got themselves killed. Police started patrolling roads with long straight stretches, and speed traps with radar appeared across the land. In 1959,  the Ohio State Patrol produced the alarmingly gruesome driver's education movie "Signal 30" in an effort to stop teenagers from racing on the highway. Filled with mutilated bloody corpses filmed at accident scenes and the live recorded cries of dying crash victims, it had little effect. The body count mounted. Nobody ever thought it would happen to them.

When highway safety issues were raised by several organizations as a result of the new wave of carnage on the highways, Nascar banned the use of fuel injection and superchargers. Dealers and manufacturers continued to offer them. They also  banned the auto companies from using race results in advertising, which they did anyway. Anyone caught violating the advertising ban lost manufacturer's points.  Hey, what the heck, the bottom line was linked to the finish line. So what if a few amateurs got killed in the process, that wasn't the car maker's fault, now was it?

The street wasn't the only place drawing attention. At Martinsville Speedway, a car vaulted over the wall into an area that had been marked no spectators allowed, but  several people had violated the rule and were badly injured. Once again, the media called for a ban on all forms of auto racing. The Automobile Manufacturers Association (AMA) met on June 6, 1957 and recommended that the auto industry take no part, nor assist in any way, auto racing or other competitive events in which speed or horsepower were emphasized.

The factory teams were disbanded  immediately, leaving  drivers, car owners, and team owners with no support, no sponsors, and no money. Bill France, in an effort to keep the drivers coming to the races, offered to pay "travel money." Every entrant would receive at least $300.

Compliance with the AMA ban did not last long. Auto makers kept adding power to their engines; Ford was the first to openly defy the order in 1960 by producing the  352 Special engine. This baby packed 10.6:1 pistons, a 306 degree solid lifter cam with .480 lift, a Holley 550 cfm 4 barrel carburetor on an aluminum intake, special exhaust manifolds, and an unrestricted air cleaner. Ford rated the engine at 360 hp @ 6000 rpm. 

Chevrolet  jumped into the fight with the 348 Police Interceptor, featuring 11.25:1 pistons, a Duntov cam, and three two barrel carburetors. It made a rather lackluster 335 hp @ 5800 rpm. Supposedly, the Chevys were faster than the Fords on the street because GM had a better transmission. I don't believe it. I never saw a 348 do anything well except blow up, and I never saw one win a race. The motor was pure junk, an overrated truck engine. They ran as good as they looked.

Pontiac, who'd had the Super Duty 389 available in pieces over the counter in 1959, now rated their top publicly available engine at 363 horsepower with 10.75:1 pistons and tri power carburetion.  Even more power was available if you knew what boxes to check, or if your name happened to be Fireball Roberts.

 Chrysler got away with such insanity as the ram inducted 413 because they had dropped out of Nascar participation after the 1956 season and nobody cared what they built. These new engines drew attention on the racetrack and also generated a lot of  sales at the dealerships, which was the main idea.

 Factory involvement with drag racing had some deep roots at Chrysler. In the 1950s some young engineers, most notably Bob Maxwell, Jim Thornton, and Tom Hoover formed the Ramchargers racing team. Working with limited resources, they  laid the groundwork for what was to come.

 In 1960, Chrysler introduced the aluminum cross ram intake setups (credited somewhat to engineer Bob Graham) for the 361, 383 and 413 motors. Detailed elsewhere, the setup suspended the carburetors over the valve covers and fed the air/fuel mixture through long two runners which fed cylinder banks on opposite sides of the engine. A short ram intake was also available, used on the 300F GT Special,  but apparently this setup was only available otherwise through the parts department. The cross rams helped Chrysler  win  nine races on the Nascar circuit that year. The 413 was  one of the few engines (the Hemi being the other) that was designed specifically for racing.  While the ram wedges, which were amazingly driveable, continued to stomp the competition on the street, the engineers were busy designing a motor designed strictly for drag and Nascar racing. Why? Pontiac again.

In late 1961, Pontiac bored and stroked its 389 CID engine to 421 CID and installed the over the counter Super Duty NASCAR goodies in it. The 421 Super Duty, as it was known,  (what a surprise) had dual four barrel carburetors on a unheated aluminum intake manifold, 12.5:1 compression, forged pistons, forged rods and crankshaft, and a radical new solid lifter camshaft with dual valve springs. This engine, advertised at 405 hp, developed a solid 450 horsepower and could rev to 6500 rpm. I know, I had one. The engine was backed up with a heavy duty clutch, four speed manual transmission, oversize drive shaft,  limited slip differential, and a special heat treated ring and pinion.

This combination was first installed in the full sized 1962 Catalina (named for the Island resort off the coast of California) and maybe a few late 1961 Catalinas as well. The package included  a lightweight aluminum hood, inner and outer front fenders, radiator supports, and front bumpers. Dealers received the cars with Plexiglass windows sitting in the back seat, ready  to install. All this weight reduction brought the cars down to 3300 lbs. and was as good as adding another 50 horsepower to the engine.

This method of weight saving was too much for the NHRA, and the rules would be changed in 1963 to ward off the eventual extra light and extra dangerous bodies they knew car makers would produce in their never ending quest for racing publicity and cash. They made  the largest engine displacement  427 cubic inches, with at least 7. 5 lbs of body weight for each cubic inch of engine displacement. This meant a minimum weight of 3200 lb for a 427 CID engine. (Doesn't explain the Pontiacs, though) Eventually, Pontiac built a few 421 Super Duty Tempests for drag racing. Don't tempt me. I knew a guy who had one; his name was Rudy Frank, and he owned a record shop in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Hope he's still around.

Chrysler was now looking to regain its racing history reputation and grab more sales. With the Sport series 300 coming out for 1962 amidst minimum interest in the very expensive letter car, Chrysler executives knew they needed something new that could crush the competition and spark sales as the original 300 had done. They had the 300F GT Special engine, and knew that it could go a lot further. They turned the engineers loose and gave them the green light. 

The result was the 1962 introduction of the Maximum Performance or "Max Wedge" 413, which came equipped with a new cross ram setup  with the carburetors mounted in a staggered pattern between the valve covers, and a pair of huge, upswept cast iron exhaust manifolds.  Pistons were available in two compression ratios: 11:1 and 13.5:1. Mechanical cams and lifters were used. The heads were a new design with huge 2.08" intake tulip shaped valves. Everything else was heavy duty, designed to withstand the rigors of racing. Behind the motors was either a 4 speed manual or a heavy duty race version of the Torqueflite transmission.

The  413 Max Wedge cars were basically unusable on the street unless you had brain damage and owned a gas station, but on the track the results were immediate. The 1962 NHRA record books show four class records established by the 413. With the correct gearing and tires, low twelve-second passes became commonplace in A Stock.

On June 1, 1963 the Max Wedge block grew to 426 cubic inches, thanks to a larger 4.25" bore. These were referred to as the Stage II engines.  In addition, Chrysler began producing special bodies for the Max Wedge cars using aluminum front ends, trunk mounted batteries, functional ram air hood scoops, plastic windows, no sound deadener or insulation, no carpets, and radio and heater delete. By this time Mopars virtually owned the Super Stock classes in the NHRA, and the introduction of the Stage II wedge gave NASCAR racers more top end power. It seems that all the auto manufacturers had decided to ignore the racing ban and had gotten back into Nascar in 1962. From a technical perspective, the Stage II motors were significant because they opened up the science of cylinder head air flow engineering. The end result of this science would be the rebirth of the 426 hemi.

The final Max Wedge, the Stage III, was released in 1964. The biggest improvements were a revised cylinder head and new camshaft design. This was the pinnacle of the Max Wedge series. Later in 1964 the Hemi was reintroduced, and would of course surpass the wedge motor in terms of performance on the race track. But it was the wedge motor that gave Mopar engineers time to perfect multi carburetor setups, camshaft designs, valve and port shapes, and bottom end reliability. And as a monument to the efforts of these engineers, the Max Wedge cars are still competitive in drag racing today. 

Unfortunately, the Max Wedge is one of the most abused collector car profiles in existence. There are countless clones cobbled together from incorrect parts, and like the apparently uncontrollable urge to call every 1958 Plymouth "Christine," any 62-64 mid sized Plymouth or Dodge is fair game for being referred to as a Max Wedge. The rat criminals that populate Ebay include the words Max Wedge in every item they sell, then jack up the prices hoping some sucker won't know the difference. How about a Max Wedge tail lamp lens? Gee, I didn't know they used special lenses. If you ever consider buying a Max Wedge, get Galen Govier to decode the plate for you and then check ALL the pertinent part numbers such as the block, cylinder heads, transmission, carburetors, and BLACK air cleaners. Sorry, no chrome. You get the point.