Chrysler C300
The hot sedans: America revs up with dreams of top performance
Horsepower has returned, and American performance sedans are in again. It's more than high time. We've been waiting too long.
When did it all begin with such cars?
I was 12, and it was one of those dreamy, sunny spring Chicago mornings in 1955 tailored for kids when I saw the first post-World War II American car expressly built as a U.S. performance sedan. It was the brawny new 1955 Chrysler C300 two-door, simply called "the 300" by auto enthusiasts. My world stopped at the sight of the auto because, as a car buff who read all the auto magazines, I knew precisely what the Chrysler C300 was all about.
Now a 1950s "dream machine," the Chrysler C300 was white with little chrome in a U.S. auto era characterized by heavy use of that metal. The tall, thin taillights were exquisitely shaped. The car had the Chrysler New Yorker Newport's body and the Chrysler Imperial's big egg-crate grille, which looked as if it might have been pulled from an early 1950s custom-bodied Ferrari. The Chrysler was insolently parked half over a low curb in front of a homey tavern in my basically blue-collar neighborhood on the West Side. Most cars in the ultra-conservative area were Fords, Chevrolets and Plymouths, so the Chrysler C300 was pretty much a rarity.
There were a few unusual cars around, but none like the Chrysler C300. The physician on the corner owned one of the first Corvettes, and a politician's son on my block had a slinky Austin-Healey 100 sports car. One dreary winter day was lit up for me when I saw a huge man with a big cigar squeezed into a Jaguar XK-120 coupe, which had limited space for even the slender, wealthy young Englishmen who bought most of them.
A screaming red Arnolt-Bristol even was parked for a few days near my home. The car had British mechanicals and sleek Italian body. Curiously, it was created by Stanley Harold "Wacky" Arnolt II, a Big Ten football star and wealthy northern Indiana industrialist. But all the kids and men in the neighborhood knew those strange foreign cars were cursed with unreliable engines. They were suicide missions. That is, you never knew if they would get you home.
Not so with the Chrysler C300's rock-solid Chrysler V-8 that dominated the engine compartment. The hood of the Chrysler C300 at the tavern was open, and the four men surrounding it peered worshipfully at that magical "Hemi" V-8, so named because it had a hemispherical combustion chambers for fantastic performance. The engine, used several years earlier in world-class Cunningham sports-racing cars, looked as if it could power one of those grand old New York Central Railroad locomotives that whisked movie stars from New York to Chicago's Union Station, where they caught the Santa Fe Super Chief to the West Coast.
The day after my Chrysler C300 experience, a big Chicago newspaper - I think it was the Daily News - devoted a full picture page to the car. In eternally optimistic 1950s America, the Chrysler C300 deserved all that space, being the country's first genuine 300-horsepower production automobile. Earlier post-World War II U.S. performance sedans existed, but few knew how really good they were. A Cadillac sedan, with its terrific new V-8, had done well at that faraway race in Le Mans, France, and a Lincoln only lightly modified by current race car standards beat exotic sports cars and won its class for several years running in the Mexican Road Race.
Americans yawned because they were oriented to traditional American sports such as baseball. So did Cadillac. Caddy was doing fine selling cars on the basis of luxury, and Lincoln, trying to compete with Cadillac, didn't want to emphasize a race victory in Mexico. Until the Chrysler C300 arrived, no Chicago newspaper devoted much room to a hot American car. But it seemed that, starting in the record car sales year of 1955, autos became a major deal with kids and adults.
The 1950s rolled on, and Chrysler 300s continued to be built. In 1956, even Plymouth, formerly a "grandmother's car," came along with the pretty Plymouth Fury sedan, which had a hot 240-horsepower V-8 and anodized gold bodyside sweepspears. Someone I rarely saw in an apartment across the street bought a Fury. I was highly intrigued. Here was a fast, rakish car carrying the formerly humble Plymouth nameplate, an auto that even had a racy dashboard!
Clean-looking Chevrolet family sedans were powered by the small, light, potent V-8 designed by genius engineer Ed Cole, who later became president of General Motors. That V-8 not only was far more reliable than foreign engines, but also enabled a Chevy sedan to blow the doors off a double-overhead-camshaft-engine Jaguar. I blinked, and the 1960s had arrived. The 300 was fading as America's premier performance sedan, but cars such as Oldsmobile's big, powerful Starfire with its colorful dashboard and Pontiac's sexy Grand Prix took up the slack. As with the original Chrysler C300, their styling was clean, and their horse power easily topped the 300 mark. Fuel economy of the performance sedans wasn't good. But gasoline was cheap and plentiful. Few gave fuel economy a thought.
Europe offered little in the way of performance sedans. The limited-production Mercedes-Benz 300SEL 6.3 would come in 1967, but it was terribly expensive and had nightmarish repair bills. The neighborhood thought it was a car for snobs, for suckers. Former racing great Jackie Stewart told me many times 1950s and 1960s American cars were "junk," partly because they lacked "precise" handling of European autos. Rubbish. Performance versions of U.S. cars were fast, colorful and exciting to everyone from 12-year-old boys to elderly men. Moreover, they were cheap to run and they ran forever - or at least until rust did them in.
The truth is, most Europeans had only graduated from bicycles to tiny, underpowered Italian Fiats, French Renaults and British Morris Minors. They would have killed to own American cars. And didn't that stock 1950 Cadillac handle well enough to finish 10th on the twisty Le Mans race circuit, beating some of the finest European sports machines?
Hot American cars became more explosive with the arrival of the legendary 1964 Pontiac GTO. It ushered in the "muscle car" or "super car" era and carried on the tradition of autos from that 1950 Caddy and 1955 Chrysler C300. Following the GTO were fantastic-performing sedans ranging from Plymouth's inexpensive Road Runner to Oldsmobile's upscale 4-4-2 and Buick's posh GS. It's not surprising that most American performance sedans in the 1960s had two doors. The American-car ethic had it that four-door autos mostly were created for drives to church and to grandmother's house on Sunday. Still, hot V-8s were available for four-door models, as was the case in the 1950s.
The best-known U.S. performance sedans came from General Motors and Chrysler in the 1950s and 1960s. Fords, such as the big 1968-69 Torino GT, were fast and worthy, but didn't catch the public's imagination. (Now, all those sedans are collectors' items.) It took former racer and car builder Carroll Shelby, currently affiliated with Chrysler, to save Ford's street performance image with his 1965-66 Shelby Mustang GT350. But that was an uncomfortable, disguised race car, too small to fit into the grand U.S. performance sedan tradition. At least Ford was in there pitching with its 1969-70 Torino Cobra. The 1970s were death for big, distinctive American performance sedans. The fuel crunch and tightening noose of emissions-control regulations left only a few decent cars, such as Pontiac's 1973-75 Grand Am.
What could one expect from a decade in which even the Corvette, America's only true sports car, lost much of its thunder? It was the European performance sedan that picked up performance prestige here in the 1970s. Remember the big, fast Mercedes and BMW sedans - the turbocharged Saabs? Finally, in the 1980s, Detroit emerged from a dreadfully dull auto decade, shook off an awful sales slump and began building exciting performance sedans again, beginning with Pontiac's four-door 6000 STE. In the late 1980s, the United States is awash with performance sedans, ranging from the Ford Taurus SHO to the Cadillac Seville Touring Sedan.
One can order many sedans with super-strong engines and sport suspensions that rank among the world's best, most practical and least expensive performance autos. A country that screwed together that elegant, awesome Chrysler C300 some 34 years ago knows a thing or two about performance sedans.
Chicago Sun-Times
February 12, 1989
Dan Jedlicka