One Of The Rarest Classic Muscle Cars Is A Dodge Pickup Truck With A 426 V8

America’s classic muscle car era was something special. Automakers were drunk with power and laced their wares with ever larger and increasingly more powerful engines. The muscle cars of the 1960s were brutish, colorful, and remain highly sought-after rides today, several decades later. Perhaps one of the coolest and rarest muscle cars of the 1960s wasn’t a car at all, but a humble Dodge pickup souped up. The Dodge D-100 Custom Sports Special pickup was so fast it could still outrun some modern cars today.

There is a certain kind of magic to the muscle car ethos. The formula has been simple since the beginning: Take a small-ish or intermediate-sized car and cram the biggest, most powerful engine you can fit into the engine bay. The classic muscle car was never known for handling prowess and they weren’t particularly exotic, either. Instead, automakers took regular cars, souped them up, and dumped them onto a public that felt a certain tingle in their body when they put that floor shifter into first gear. Muscle cars have always been about bringing drama to the street.

Some automotive historians mark the 1949 Oldsmobile 88 as the start of the muscle car timeline. The 88 rode on the same GM’s A-body platform as the 76, but differed from the 76 in one key trait. The 76 had a straight-six while the 88 was locked and loaded with Oldsmobile’s 303 cubic-inch Rocket V8. Sure, it made a modest 135 HP, but the relatively small 88 was so fast that it absolutely dominated in NASCAR. This was a car so quick and so beloved that it was the choice of bootleggers running from the law and even became a famous song, Rocket 88.

Yet, the Oldsmobile came too early to enjoy what became America’s muscle car fever. For many, the start of the muscle car era was marked with the successful launch of the 1964 Pontiac Tempest GTO. In the mid-1960s, America had an insatiable lust for big power and automakers were happy to deliver. The GTO was joined by the Chevy Chevelle SS, the Oldsmobile 442, and the Buick Gran Sport. Plymouth added spice to its Barracuda with a 426 Hemi V8, Dodge Chargers had engines as large as 440 cubic inches, and even AMC was having tons of fun draping cars with loads of power.

An inconceivable amount of ink has been spilled about the ’60s muscle car era, but less often talked about is how the muscle car era bled into other markets like pickup trucks. If you bring up the topic of a classic muscle truck, a classic car nerd will undoubtedly talk about the iconic Dodge Li’l Red Express truck of the 1970s. But Dodge was lighting up the tires of pickup trucks long before then.

The Dodge D-100 Custom Sports Special and its optional chunky engine might not have had the flashy big rig looks of the later Li’l Red Express, but it was a completely unexpected kind of pickup truck.

A Truck That Does Everything

In 1960, Dodge announced its freshest lineup of pickup trucks. The new D series was a bigger and more durable truck than its C series predecessor, with dramatic changes all over. According to Hagerty, the D series finally ditched Chrysler’s older engines and instead opted for the now fabled Slant Six as the truck’s base engine.

On the outside, the D series left the dramatic curves in the past and this new truck was largely slab-sided with only a couple of creases to break up the flat panels.

Despite the truck’s plain looks, Dodge gave the new D series real advancements. These improvements include the use of an alternator, a strong drop center frame, and the first time a crew cab was available in a Dodge truck. The D series was a tour de force for a truck and it gave workers a modern and powerful tool to help them exceed in their trade. But Dodge aspired for this truck to be more than just a tool.

As I’ve noted in several previous pieces, pickup trucks in this era were beginning to gain mainstream appeal. Trucks were slowly becoming more than just tools as a growing number of drivers made them their daily transportation. Automakers responded with experiments that combined the comforts of cars and trucks. The Custom Sports Special was partially that, but it went even further.

Hot Rod magazine speculates that the impetus for the option for higher power might have been DJ Dick Boynton’s Dragmaster D100 truck from 1963. That truck featured a 413-cubic inch Max Wedge V8 good for 420 HP and 12.71-second quarter mile runs, properly quick for a truck back then.

According to the book Dodge Trucks published by Don Bunn, Dodge made a concept truck out of a Dodge D100 Sweptline and brought it out to Southern California for car enthusiasts and journalists to look over. That “Palomino” concept looked like what the D100 Custom Sports Special would become and Dodge was out there to do market research. The SoCal market apparently responded with enough joy to convince Dodge brass to make and sell that truck to the public.

In April 1964, Motor Trend‘s Carl Isica published a glowing review, stating that their Palomino delivered “pleasantly alarming” acceleration, and that was with the truck’s standard 202 HP 318 V8. The magazine mentioned that there was more than enough power on tap to chirp the tires in first and second gear during even on “normal” starts.

The review went even further, questioning whether the Palomino was even a truck anymore. The conundrum was evident later on in the review:

“In this one unit, you get the following features: 1) A rugged, heavy-duty truck for hauling coach campers. 2) Plush, comfortable cab for the most demanding twosome. 3) Tasteful styling — it’ll be at home in any neighborhood. 4) Power and performance to suit any lead-foot driver.”

The result of just about everyone being smitten was a production truck called the 1964 D100 Custom Sports Special and according to the marketing, the truck was supposed to appeal to racing fans. But it was also supposed to be plush like a car and wicked fast for a truck.

The package, which started at $235 ($2,415 today) on top of the price of a roughly $2,000 ($20,561 today) D100, was nominally a style and comfort package that raided the Chrysler parts bin. Coughing up the cash got you black vinyl bucket seats from the Dodge Dart GT and a center console from the Polara 500 complete with a cigarette lighter. Now, that’s not quite luxurious enough, so Dodge also added full plush carpeting, adorned the truck with lots of chrome, and then completed the look with racing stripes. Your CSS even came with armrests and sunvisors!

Now, if you just wanted a luxurious truck you could have stopped there. As such, the CSS was available with all of the standard engines found in the D100. Yep, you could have ordered your D100 CSS with a 225 cubic inch Slant Six making 140 HP. Dodge also stated that you were able to slap the CSS package onto a D200, a 4×4, or even a chassis cab if you wanted to.

The Real Muscle Truck

But the halo model of the CSS was the High-Performance Package. For the price of $1,235 ($12,696 today) on top of the truck, you got a 413 cubic inch Street Wedge four-barrel dual-exhaust V8 placed in the engine bay. This engine — a street version of the Max Wedge drag racing engine — was rated for 360 HP and according to Hot Rod magazine, putting it into a CSS truck wasn’t a walk in the park. As the magazine writes, there was:

“[A] high degree of hand fabrication involved (custom brackets were made to attach the Imperial/300 traction bars to the rear axle, a frame crossmember had to be torched out and replaced with brackets, the firewall had to be dented for exhaust-manifold clearance, etc. ).”

Update: As many readers have pointed out, this 426 should not be confused with the 426 Hemi that you might be more familiar with. The 426 Wedge is a development of the RB family.

Later, the 413 was replaced with a 365 HP 426 Wedge V8, and those lucky enough to configure their D100 with the 426 Wedge got a Stewart-Warner 6,000 RPM tach and a push-button 727 LoadFlite three-speed automatic. You were also given heavier-duty springs and power steering to go with your posh muscle truck. Your only real catch was that you were limited to a wheelbase of 122 inches. Well, and you had to pony up a lot of cash.

But if you had the funds, your reward was a truck capable of dispatching 60 mph in under eight seconds and stomped the quarter mile in less than 16 seconds.

Steve Bell, the owner of a CSS HPP, details that the process was even crazier than how Hot Rod described it:

The 426 high performance package on the newly re-designed 1965-second series truck was an after thought. When the truck came down the assembly line they actually had to take the truck off the line and send it to a special shop. There they had to modify the frame (they literally torched the transmission frame cross member), build special motor mounts, build a new transmission cross member, install torque rods for the 3:91 posi-traction rear end, modify the cab to allow clearance for the exhaust manifold (they just pounded out a dent in the firewall), install the add on power steering and power brakes. I can’t verify this, but I believe that after building our truck the Dodge engineers said no more. In 1966 (which came out one month later in September of 1965) you could buy the same truck but with the 318 as the largest power plant available.

Decades Ahead Of Its Time

Dodge marketed the CSS as being a truck for work, play, and comfort. That sounds a lot like the missions of today’s sport trucks, but decades before such a thing became popular. But that’s the thing. While Americans might have been interested in comfortable trucks, there wasn’t yet a ton of demand for a pickup truck that was also a muscle car. Company brass limited production of the Custom Sports Special High-Performance Package to just 50 units. So, if you find a D100 CSS out there it’ll almost certainly be one with a milder engine.

As for the CSS itself, that package continued to sell until 1967. Sadly, while the D100 CSS itself is believed to be rare, it’s unclear how many people paid the cash for the option. It’s also unknown how many D200 CSS units are out there as well. Only the 50-count figure for the D100 CSS HPP is known and of those, it’s believed there are around two dozen left today. I couldn’t even tell you what one of the CSS HPP trucks is worth since I can’t seem to find even an archived ad for one. A decent regular CSS seems to be worth somewhere around $20,000 depending on the engine.

Hot Rod magazine hails the CSS HPP as the world’s first big-block muscle truck. The classic muscle era was so wild that Dodge actually went through with such a crazy idea. Trucks with ridiculous power outputs and the luxuries of cars are common today, but back in 1964 it was a novel idea. It’s hard to imagine a world where trucks didn’t become more than just work vehicles, but here was Dodge proving that trucks could be more back in the 1960s.

Top graphic image: Dodge