In much the same way I can still remember the first time I felt the brutal acceleration of a hot-rodded muscle car (it was the neighbor’s ’70 Duster 340 when I was about 8 years old), I can also recall the first time I felt the lateral force of a hard-cornering car being pushed through a turn.
In that second instance, the car was an MGB, which makes sense as sports cars were the vehicles expected to handle twisty roads with aplomb; muscle cars were built to go fast in a straight line. But that blast as a 12-year-old passenger through a sweeping turn in the not-so-powerful MG was almost as exhilarating as the forward thrust of the Duster. Naturally, like any budding gearhead, I later wondered: What if one car could do both?
If you look back to the post-war period and read car magazines from that time, you’ll probably notice that the gearheads of that time had experienced similar epiphanies, probably after being introduced to sports cars while in Europe as GIs. The practice of hopping up old jalopies to make them go faster had already been under way in the states, while seeking improvements to help them turn corners more ably seemed to kick in a little later. But by the mid-to-late ‘50s, the focus swung back to acceleration, probably in reaction to the advent of organized drag racing.
Still, the thrill that comes from blazing through a corner at speed is infectious, and muscle car fans came back around to it in time. During the ‘70s, the influential west-coast car mags would occasionally feature modified muscle cars that were referred to as “canyon carvers,” often with references to the clandestine (and illegal) racing that was said to take place on L.A.’s Mulholland Drive, a notoriously challenging road that snakes along the top of the Hollywood hills. Even though the number of racers participating in those contests was undoubtedly quite small, the influence of those magazine stories and references to the same group in certain period TV shows seemed to leave a lasting impression on legions of enthusiasts across the country who liked the idea of a road-race-capable hot rod.
I was certainly one of them, and I can also recall the impression made one night when a friend and I took a joyride in a borrowed ’78 Plymouth Fury. It was a former detective car equipped with the highway pursuit package that paired a 440 drivetrain with stout suspension and brakes. We took the Plymouth up to a section of highway that wended around the shore of a reservoir north of town and were astounded at the stone aged Mopar’s ability to stay flat through the turns and we pushed it harder and harder.
This performance contrasted dramatically with the behavior we’d come to know from the ’69 Charger owned by my friend who was piloting the cop car that evening. The Charger was typical of ‘60s American intermediates then – relatively comfortable to drive around town, but quick to lean hard whenever steering wheel was rotated more than a few degrees. Attempting to go around turns quickly instilled little confidence, a sensation amplified by the non-R/T Charger’s undersized four-wheel drums.
The police-spec Fury, on the other hand, felt as if it were taunting us, encouraging attempts to take each successive turn a little faster. When we finally did get a little too aggressive, the Plymouth let us know without completely losing its composure – also very different behavior than what we’d come to know from typical American cars of the muscle era.
Even our teenaged brains knew enough to realize that what lay beneath the cop-car Plymouth was not very different from the underpinnings of the Charger. Both were Mopar B-bodies after all, so of course, a lot of that night was spent scheming, as we tried to figure out how to put the Fury’s good bits under the Charger.
The years to follow have made clear to me that plenty of other hot-rod-minded tinkerers have had similar experiences with cars that could corner, urging efforts to bring those qualities to conventional muscle cars. We’ve tapped into one of them for this issue, with a story on handling upgrades penned by Jeff Smith, who was also one of the people writing those magazine stories about canyon carvers from California back in the ‘80s during his tenure as the editor of Car Craft and then Hot Rod magazines. Jeff’s been working to make his ’65 Chevelle competitive on a road course since the early ‘90s and has used it to surprise quite a few drivers of European machines at track days, so his insights come from experience.
That drive to bring the forces of acceleration and lateral grip together continues to motivate plenty of projects involving Detroit steel, resulting in efforts like our cover car, a drag-strip refugee that can now hang with Porsches on a road course. Meanwhile, that Camaro can also comfortably manage long-distance road trips and maintains the ability to click off impressive ETs. Who says muscle cars can only do one thing well?
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