America has a longstanding love affair with the automobile, and street racing is as old as the automobile itself. But it became especially prevalent during the heyday of hot rodding and muscle cars, the latter being a term for 1960s (and early 1970s) special editions of mass-production cars whose build and design were optimized for power and speed.
America has a longstanding love affair with the automobile, and street racing is as old as the automobile itself. But it became especially prevalent during the heyday of hot rodding and muscle cars, the latter being a term for 1960s (and early 1970s) special editions of mass-production cars whose build and design were optimized for power and speed.
As industry rivalries, like Mopar (Dodge, Plymouth, and Chrysler) and Ford, battled to create the ultimate high-performance street machines, muscle cars became the pride of showrooms and dealerships across the country, and the prized possession of young Americans who saw in their powerful engines and provocative paint jobs the embodiment of mid-century America’s optimistic, boisterous, and rebellious youth culture.Nowhere was this as evident than on the streets after nightfall, where heavy block engines rumbled down the strip after sundown, sidewalks brimming with young people enjoying the spectacle of cruising slow and feeling free.As Richard J. McCloskey writes in the introduction to his photobook Van Nuys Boulevard, 1972, “There was a time, lasting a full thirty years, when every main street in every town, and in every city in America was teeming with a celebration of young people and their automobiles. From the late 1940s through the end of the 1970s, the culture of ‘cruising’ captured and dominated the ‘public space’ during the evenings along the chosen thoroughfares.”Indeed, on the West Coast, the countercultures of surf and drag racing combined to create a uniquely Californian scene. Van Nuys Boulevard in the central San Fernando Valley was a popular cruising strip throughout the 1950s and ’60s, and McHenry Avenue in Modesto is perhaps the most famous cruising strip (or main drag), captured in the classic George Lucas film American Graffiti, based on Lucas's teenage street-racing years and hot rod enthusiasts he’d known.Automakers worked hard to create machines that captured the youthful zeitgeist, ensuring their muscle cars not only looked cool but also had a winning reputation. The Pontiac GTO, a car often considered to have strongly influenced the muscle car era, was introduced in 1964 as an optional package for the intermediate-size Pontiac Tempest.The new Mustang Mach 1 had a "shaker hood," an air intake attached to the engine that stuck up through a hole and throbbed along with the V-8. And Chrysler finally got serious about pony cars and introduced a burly Plymouth Barracuda, one of the first muscle cars to be based on the smaller compact car body size. At a base price of $2,796.00, it could run a quarter mile in 13.33 seconds at 106.50 mph on the drag strip.Speed and power are attractive forces, but automakers also found creative ways to relate to the trendy irreverence of the ’60s counterculture. Wild colors were in vogue, and paint jobs followed suit.Mercury is thought to be the first, in 1968, to introduce a color called Calypso Coral, available for the Montego series. The paint formula had its origins in Poppy Red, a color for the 1965 Mustang. American Motors decided to work the youth market with moxie, offering bright hues in 1969 with the names Big Bad Orange, Big Bad Green, and Big Bad Blue, available for Javelins and AMXs, complete with painted bumpers. Dodge and Plymouth also had a "high impact" palette with fun names like Tor-Red, Plum Crazy, and Go-Man-Go. In media and entertainment, muscle cars were increasingly prominent characters across television and film, adding to the car culture mystique. Three films in particular still resonate for high-powered thrills: Vanishing Point, Two-Lane Blacktop, and Bullitt.Released in 1968, Bullitt’s classic car chase scene—featuring McQueen at the wheel of a 1968 Ford Mustang 390 GT Fastback and the bad guys in a 1968 Dodge Charger 440 Magnum—is considered one of the screen's all-time best.Cruising and drag race culture were further immortalized in the songs of the ’60s and the short-lived ascent of hot rod music, which included hits from the likes of The Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, Ronny and the Daytonas, and The Fantastic Baggys, all celebrating fast cars and good times. In fact, from 1961 to 1965, some fifteen hundred car songs were recorded.The songs, the slang, the street scene, and all the rest that made up muscle car mania began fading away in the 1970s. Progressively tighter limits on tailpipe emissions forced automakers to detune engines via lowered compression ratios, more restrictive intakes, and other power-sapping measures. New Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards called for adding crash-protection features such as bigger, sturdier, heavier bumpers.Demand for big, fast, thirsty cars further dried up as rising gas prices and hefty insurance premiums forced many buyers to look at thriftier, more affordable compacts and imported mini-cars. By the mid-’70s, most of the original muscle cars had disappeared, while others (like the Pontiac Trans Am) continued to evolve. It was a sign of changing times, but the influence of muscle cars and the era they represent in American culture is broad, deep, and continues to hold an allure that transcends generations.
WRITTEN BY Andrew Pogany
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