Hoover
with a 1962 Max Wedge
The utter dominance of
Chrysler’s brand-new Hemi V8 racing engine at the 1964 Daytona 500 astounded
NASCAR fans and competitors alike. Plymouths powered by 426-cid Hemis ran to a
lopsided 1-2-3 victory at Daytona, with Richard Petty taking the checkered flag
in his No. 43 Plymouth after leading for 184 of the 200 laps at a
record-breaking average speed of more than 154 mph.
Plymouths and Dodges
powered by the 426 Hemi blazed through the NASCAR season to the championship,
but competitors from Ford and GM protested: the Hemis were not production
engines that a consumer could buy in showrooms, as mandated by NASCAR rules. So
Hemis were banned for the 1965 racing year.
But they were back for
1966 as Chrysler started offering 400-horsepower versions of the engine in a
number of its high-performance production cars. In the meantime, the 426 Hemi
was roaring to record-breaking drag-racing victories in NHRA competition.
For racing fans, the
426 Hemi seemed to come out of nowhere. Indeed, the engine was the result of a
remarkable skunkworks effort by dedicated members of a Chrysler team that
created the legendary V8 in less than a year. That team was led by engineer and
racer Tom Hoover, who now is considered “the godfather” of the Hemi.
“That was a thrilling
time, one of the best times of my life, I’ll tell you,” said Hoover, 84, during
a telephone interview with ClassicCars.com from his home in Denton, Texas.
The
1964 Chrysler hemispheric combustion chamber circuit-racing engine. (Illustration:
Chrysler)
In April, Chrysler
celebrates the 50th anniversary of the birth of the 426 Hemi performance engine
with a special nod to Hoover and his team. The celebration coincides with the
centennial of the Dodge brand. While there will be special events throughout
the year, the official celebration happens April 11-13 when Mopars at the Strip
is staged at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
The effort to create
the 426 Hemi started in April 1963, Hoover said, when the relatively new
Chrysler chairman, Lynn Townsend, announced he wanted to win the Daytona 500 in
1964. With that announcement, Hoover assembled a team of engineers and engine
experts to tackle the challenge.
Chrysler V8 engines with
hemispherical combustion chambers were nothing new, Hoover said. Chrysler added them to its fleet
in 1951 and continuing to offer them through 1958, although their performance
potential was largely untapped.
“These engines were
not performance engines,” Hoover said. “And upper management always considered
them too expensive to build.”
Before the 426 Hemi
project, Hoover had been instrumental in the design of the powerful Max Wedge
V8 that superseded the first-generation Hemis. Besides being durable and less
expensive to produce, the Max Wedge proved to be a formidable challenger in
drag racing.
“By 1963, it became
dominant in drag racing,” Hoover said. “If you didn’t have a Max Wedge, you
came in second.”
Hoover admits,
however, that the Max Wedge’s success came despite its inherent limitations.
“They didn’t have a cylinder-head configuration that was very productive in
power output, especially at high speeds,” he said. “In spite of all that, we
used the base engine, put a ram manifold on it, big ports, big valves, high
compression, and so forth, and we were pretty successful.
“Except in NASCAR. We
ruled in Super Stock at the drags but in NASCAR, with one carburetor and so
forth, it wasn’t really competitive.”
Then the order from
the top came down.
“Suddenly, Mr.
Townsend said, ‘Gee I would sure like to see us win Daytona Beach in 1964,’”
Hoover recalled. There was a flurry of meetings and cost estimates, after which
“Mr. Townsend said, ‘I think that’s a good thing to do. Go.’ So we did.”
One reason Chrysler management chose
Hoover to head the
engine-design teams was because of his personal experience in drag racing after
he joined Chrysler engineering in 1955.
“A
group of us became familiar with one another at lunchtime and formed the Ramchargers
group, and we went drag racing.” The Ramchargers went on to become one of the
most-successful and most-famous drag-racing team of all time.
Townsend’s desire to
prepare a new engine for Daytona created a very small time window for designing
and testing with the big race just 10 months away. While that might not seem
like such a tight schedule today, with computers and other modern design aids,
Hoover said in those days it seemed next to impossible when the basic tools
were “a wooden bore, paper and pencil.”
However, Hoover and
the other Chrysler engineers and designers were not without experience in
wresting power from a Hemi engine, he noted. There was the design of an engine
for Indycar racing, the A311, as well as the success of Hemis on the drag
strip.
But this was
different, and a much bigger challenge, he said.
“The base engine
itself was not really changed for drag racing,” Hoover said. “The (426) Hemi
was a different ballgame in which there were basic structural changes to
everything.”
Through 1963, the rush
was on. Hoover credits Chrysler management with allowing the Hemi-design
program to proceed without interference as a team effort. The approach, Hoover
said, was taken from the management theories of the acclaimed U.S. statistician
Dr. W. Edwards Deming, who was instrumental in forging Japan’s economic
recovery from the ruins of World War II.
A
custom 426 Hemi under the hood of a 1970 Plymouth Hemi ‘Cuda. (Photo:
Barrett-Jackson)
“The Max Wedge and in
particular the 426 Hemi were the first instances of the company’s use of Dr.
Deming’s basic approach to things,” Hoover said. “Both of these programs were
horizontally oriented, not vertically oriented in the old style, with 15 layers
of folks between the grunts and somebody who could make a decision.”
Each member of the
team of engine experts was able to express his abilities and take ownership of
the Hemi project, Hoover said, “with very gratifying results.”
“We were able to
operate in a way in which everybody’s talent and ideas could be applied.
Because the people who were involved had ownership in the program, they were
willing to do whatever it took to make it successful. It was also great fun, by
the way.”
Low-restriction airflow was a key
component of the hemispheric
cylinder-head design, which allowed larger valves and direct cross flow. But
there was an issue with optimizing the placement of the exhaust-valve push rods
while still maximizing intake air flow. The solution was found in tilting each
cylinder head toward the center, but there was still more refinement required.
“Boy, that was tough,”
Hoover said. “For the solution to that one, we went to the great airflow guru,
Harry Weslake, over in England. Harry was the guy most people credit with the
success of the Rolls-Royce Merlin aircraft engine, without which the Battle of
Britain (in 1940) might have gone the other way.”
Airflow
and durability became the hallmarks of the 426 Hemi, which added the horsepower
and reliability needed for NASCAR success, he said.
“We did very well is
terms of air volumetric efficiency, the ability of the engine to pump air
through the cylinders. Beyond that it could support an awful lot of load.”
The booming success at
the 1964 Daytona 500 confirmed everything that the Hemi engine team had been
working on, Hoover added.
“I wasn’t even there
for the race; the whole thing is kind of a blur,” Hoover recalled. “I went down
for the practice and for the qualifying races. Once I was sure that the cars
were going to go like stink, I left for Pomona (Raceway) because we were
potentially going to run some Hemis at the drags.
“I knew we had the
speed. We listened to the (Daytona) race on the radio.”
Nowadays, Hoover is still at it,
helping to design engine systems and participating in racing. Only now it’s with his son, Tom,
who is an engineer at General Electric Locomotive; they are helping convert
diesel train engines to run partially on natural gas.
He’s also doing
vintage drag racing with his son, campaigning a ’64 Dodge powered by a Max
Wedge V8.
“We’re running now in
Pure Stock, which has been a real gas,” Hoover said. “We’re running a Max Wedge
and having an awful lot of fun with it. Pure Stock is kind of the underground
of drag racing these days. It’s a challenge to see what you can do on narrow
bias-ply tires.”
Hoover will be an
honored guest at the annual Mopars at the Strip celebration April 11-13 in Las
Vegas, along with several original members of the Ramchargers race team, as
Chrysler marks the 50th anniversary of the Hemi racing team and the centennial
of Dodge.
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