ROBINSON COLUMN: ‘The King’s’ Hemi blew them away

Bill Robinson
On Jericho Hill
Published: February 17, 2008

Editor’s Note: Richard Petty brought a near-secret engine to Daytona in 1964. It would become the fabled Hemi-426 (cubic inches). Its speed would become legendary. Bill Robinson of The Atlanta-Journal Constitution named Petty ‘King Richard’ (in part because of the King Kong engine, built by Chrysler). This is the second of two parts.

Palm trees, their fronds laden with ice, rattled in the wind on this Feb. 23, 1964.

The breakers rolling in from the Atlantic Ocean seemed indifferent to the history about to be made at Daytona Beach.  This Sunday was “The Time of Richard Petty.”

The handsome young driver from Level Cross, N.C., son of two-time NASCAR national champion Lee Petty, was about to step into racing history. 

Richard drove the “rabbit” car for the Petty team — the racer that performed as just “the other car.” Daddy Lee was the dominator. Richard had never won on a big track like the 2 1/2-mile, steeply banked Daytona oval — the fastest in all of NASCAR (Talladega was yet to be built).

Lee, winner of the Daytona 500 in 1959, however, had almost died going over the rail at Daytona in 1960. Richard was now in the fastest of the two cars in the Blue Angel Plymouth team. And he had a huge power plant, with which to compete.

Plymouth could not win against the Big Three: the Pontiac, Chevrolet and the Ford. Then someone remembered the huge 426-cubic inch hemispherical head engine.

It was a product of the 1950’s. a long-stroke “steamer” of an engine. Manufactured for the luxury Chrysler, the so-called “Doctor’s wives” automobile, the King Kong engine was too powerful.

Chrysler pulled the engines, placing them in thick grease inside wooden crates to be warehoused. These were the engines that someone remembered when race strategists sought to “catch up” with the fast cars like Pontiac.

Well, they not only caught up, but the little Plymouth with the big engine began to “blow their doors off,” as the saying went in racing. 

I thought back to my days in the U.S. Navy; on the Boxer, an aircraft carrier, the Navy had sent four small, dark-blue little jet fighters. It was the first time for jets on a carrier. Man, but those little blue babies were swift! Launched off the flight deck, one at a time, the jet would disappear from view on take-off, seemingly falling into the sea. Then, BOOM! ... like they were suddendly kicked in the buttocks, they delivered like a sling-shot.

Well, that’s exactly the way Richard Petty’s racer appeared at Daytona ‘64.

Up, up and away! ... far out front ... no contest. And it wasn’t!

Petty led 184 of the 200 laps. The mighty King Kong engine was just that strong. It seemed like it had been specially built for Daytona, yet it was one of the strangest accidents in racing history.

An engine rescued from obscurity, taken from a crate in an almost forgotten Chrysler warehouse (of course, there were dozens of them, and they were put to good use in that historic year). 

Ol’ Blue, as Richard was called, was only 26. But he ran the Fords until their tongues hung out ... and then they died, their engines and their energy just flat gave out.

I wrote in my race story for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution story about the fact that the Fords of Fireball Roberts, Freddie Lorenzen and Marvin Panch had all three “parked in despair between the three-four turn ... all in a row ... dead in the Daytona dust ... and Richard rode the high rim, racing into history.”

It was the first of a record seven Daytona 500s that Petty would win. No racer has ever approached this success at Daytona, the ultra-prestigious address of stock car racing.
Richard also won the national title of NASCAR that season — the first of seven Winston Cup championships he would win in a super career that would see him triumph in 200 races (the closest to him is David Pearson, who won 105). 

The late Dale Earnhardt also won seven Winston Cup titles, but he could manage but one Daytona 500 victory. 

The King Kong engine was out-lawed by NASCAR for the 1965 season. Richard Petty and all Chrysler-product race drivers boycotted NASCAR that season.

Bill Robinson is a retired columnist living in Chambers County.