Mother MoPar may not have been first to the performance party, but she became the life of it. Wild colors, outrageous stripe packages and hairy engines meant MoPar had arrived. Beating MoPar to the go-fast fun were Ford with its flat-head V-8 of 1932 and General Motors with its overhead-valve V-8 in Oldsmobile and Cadillacs in 1949. When the hemi-head V-8 came out in 1951, Chrysler Corp. swung the door open and didn’t stop partying. The quick Chrysler C-300 luxury sports car arrived in 1955, wildly low and finned models appeared for 1957, dual-cross-ram intakes swirled on the market in 1960 and shrunken Dodges and Plymouths for 1962 took a “Max Wedge” version of the big Chrysler/Imperial 413-cid V-8 and went racing.
By this time, Ma MoPar was dancing on tables and asking, “Why not build a performance truck?”
Whether or not the decision to build a hot pickup was alcohol-induced, there was an immediate precedent for
