Dropping the new-for-1966 Hemi into the new-for-1966 Charger gave Dodge its first proper muscle car. Pairing the division’s in-vogue new fastback body with its race-bred, barely tamed V-8, should have set hearts and minds exploding. It’s not even like this was some back-door track fantasy—Hemi Chargers were in your local Dodge showroom up the street, waiting to be discovered. These days, that’s a recipe for a monstrous street beast (or else a collector piece that will sit under a cover). But in 1966, it wasn’t quite planned to happen that way.
In 1960, Chrysler launched the Valiant as part of Detroit’s seemingly orchestrated suite of compact American cars; while the driveline was simplicity itself, the style was wild enough that even its own brochure didn’t try to convince you of how good it looked. A year later, Dodge launched its own badge-engineered version, called Lancer, but it got lost in the sauce: Lancer sales were half of that of the Valiant, and Valiant sales were half that of its crosstown rival, the Ford Falcon. After this, Chrysler bosses did their best to differentiate Dodges and Plymouths.
This is why, when Plymouth grafted a fastback body onto its restyled Valiant for mid-1964 and called it Barracuda (thus launching what would later come to be known as the “pony car” market weeks before Ford’s Falcon-based Mustang arrived), Dodge wasn’t allowed to have a Dart fastback. Make no mistake, Dodge wanted one: out of fashion 15 years earlier, the body style had suddenly regained importance. The Corvette coupe looked smashing, and roundy-round race teams were discovering that such rooflines cleaved the wind more efficiently. The reduction in rear headroom was a small price to pay for high style and potential racing (i.e. promotional) victories.
