How Dodge’s 426 Wedge Built America’s First Muscle Truck
Spring of 1964, a Dodge truck dealer in Southern California gets a phone call that changes everything.
A customer wants to order a D100 pickup.
Nothing unusual about that.
Dodge sells thousands of them every year.
Work trucks, farm trucks, simple, reliable haulers.
But this customer does not want something simple.
He wants the high performance package.
Under the hood is a 426 cubic inch street wedge V8.
365 horsepower, 470 lb feet of torque.
The same engine drag racers were using to dominate the 1/4 mile.
The dealer had to tell him the truth.
You will need to pay cash upfront, no financing, and it is going to cost you $1,235 extra.
That is $12,700 in today’s money on top of a truck that already costs over $2,000.
The customer says yes.
And Dodge is about to build one of the rarest, most insane factory trucks ever to roll off an assembly line.
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The muscle truck that predates every Lightning, every SRT10, every high-performance pickup you have ever seen.
To understand how crazy this truck was, you need to understand 1964.
Pickups were work vehicles, period.
Farmers used them, contractors used them.
They had bench seats, rubber floors, and enough power to haul a load.
Nothing more.
The idea of a performance truck that did not exist.
But Chrysler was already deep in the performance game.
In 1962, they had introduced the Max Wedge, a drag racing engine that was dominating NH competition.
The 413 cubic inch version was putting out 420 horsepower and running 12 second/4 miles.
Then in 1963, a San Diego disc jockey named Dick Boon did something nobody expected.
He bought a brand new Dodge D100 pickup, ripped out the Slant 6, and dropped in a 413 Max Wedge, 420 horsepower in a truck.
At the 1963 Winter Nationals in Pomona, Boon’s Dragmaster truck ran a 12.71 second/4 mile at 108 mph in the BFX class.
A 3,900lb truck with 70% of its weight on the front axle.
And he won.
People went nuts.
A truck beating purpose-built drag cars.
Dodge’s engineers noticed.
More importantly, Dodge’s marketing department noticed what if they could sell that.
So, they built a concept.
They called it the Palamino Sport pickup.
They took it to Southern California car shows, let journalists drive it, and watched the reaction.
Motor Trends Carl Isa drove one and called the acceleration pleasantly alarming.
That was just with the standard 318 V8 engine.
The response was clear.
People wanted this.
Enough of them wanted it that Dodge decided to actually build it.
In April 1964, Dodge officially announced the custom sports special.
It was everything a work truck was not.
Bucket seats from a Dodge Dart GT, a center console from a Polaro, actual carpet in a pickup truck, racing stripes, chrome, the whole nine yards.
You could order a custom sports special with any engine Dodge offered, even the 225 Slant 6 if you were boring.
But the real package, the one that made history, was the high-performance package.
The high performance package turned your fancy truck into a legitimate muscle machine.
First, the engine.
Early 1964 trucks got the 413 Street Wedge with 360 horsepower.
By midyear, Dodge upgraded to the 426 Street wedge.
It used the same basic architecture as the Max Wedge drag engine, but it was detuned for the street.
It produced 365 horsepower and 470 lb feet of torque.
It had a four-barrel carburetor, dual exhaust, and 10.2:1 compression.
That engine came with a pushb button 727 LoadFlight 3-speed automatic.
There was no manual option.
Chrysler did not have a manual transmission that could handle that kind of torque yet.
The push button shifter sat right on the dash.
It had heavyduty springs.
Traction bars were borrowed from the Imperial and the Chrysler 300 mounted above the rear axle to prevent wheel hop.
Power steering was standard because you needed it with that much weight up front.
And the gauge package.
It had a sun tachometer, a 6,000 revolutions per minute red line, an oil pressure gauge, a water temperature gauge, and an amiter.
This wasn’t a work truck anymore.
This was a statement.
But building one, that was a nightmare.
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The engineering madness is just getting started.
Here is what Dodge did not advertise.
The high-performance package trucks were handbuilt nightmares.
When a customer ordered one, the truck could not just roll down the regular assembly line.
There were too many custom modifications required.
The frame had to be reinforced.
Custom brackets had to be fabricated to mount those imperial traction bars to the rear axle.
A frame crossmember had to be cut out and replaced with special brackets.
The firewall had to be hammered in to create clearance for the exhaust manifolds.
Steve Bell, who owns one of these trucks, described the process.
When the truck came down the assembly line, they actually had to take it off the line and send it to a special shop.
These were not assembly line trucks.
They were practically custom builds.
That’s why the price was so insane.
$1,235 for the HPP.
67% of the base truck’s price.
And Dodge required full payment upfront.
No financing through Chrysler Corporation.
You paid cash or you didn’t get one.
And here’s the kicker.
Dodge probably lost money on every one they built.
Between 1964 and 1966, Dodge officially sold just 50 HP trucks.
50.
That’s it.
Over three model years.
Most had the 426 engine.
A couple early ones had the 413.
To put that in perspective, in those same 3 years, Dodge sold hundreds of thousands of regular D100 pickups.
The HPP truck wasn’t a money maker.
It was a halo vehicle, a marketing tool.
A statement that Dodge could build anything.
And the trucks they built, they were legitimately fast.
0 to 60 in under 8 seconds.
Quarter mile in less than 16 seconds, top speed over 100 mph.
In 1964, that was faster than most muscle cars.
This was a work truck with a bed in the back, and it could accelerate faster than a Corvette.
Of those 50 HP trucks Dodge built, only about two dozen are known to still exist today.
Some were wrecked, some were worked to death, some just rusted away in fields.
But the survivors, they are automotive legends.
Finding one for sale is nearly impossible.
I have not seen one at public auction since 2015.
When they do surface, they rarely have documentation.
Verification of the CSS package requires either a SERT sticker or a build sheet, and most of those have been lost to time.
The custom sports special package itself without the HPP is estimated to have sold maybe a few hundred units, but even those are rare enough that accurate production numbers do not exist.
What we do know is the 426 wedge engine was only available in these trucks from 1965 through early 1966.
That is less than 2 years.
Then Dodge discontinued it entirely.
Why?
Because in 1966, the 426 Hemi arrived.
The Street Hemi made 425 horsepower, 60 more than the Wedge, and it had the racing pedigree to back it up, the Wedge was done.
But here’s the thing about the Wedge trucks.
They were first.
14 years before Dodge built the Little Red Express.
Decades before Ford introduced SVT Lightning or Ram built SRT10, the 1964 Dodge D100HP was the world’s first factory big block muscle truck and almost nobody knows it existed.
Today, these trucks live in a strange space.
They are too rare to be wellknown, too old to have the documentation younger collectors expect, too weird to fit into traditional muscle car categories.
A decent custom sports special without the HPP sells for around $20,000, maybe $25,000 if it is really clean.
But an HPPP truck with the 426 engine, if you could even find one, the sky’s is the limit.
The problem is verification.
Without the SER T sticker, you cannot prove what you have.
Most of those stickers peeled off or faded decades ago.
Some trucks have been cloned.
Regular D100 trucks modified to look like CSS models.
It happens.
That is why documentation matters.
But the real trucks, the verified, documented, original HPP trucks, they are museum pieces.
Rolling history.
The trucks that invented a category nobody knew they wanted.
Every modern performance truck owes its existence to these 50 Dodge D100 trucks.
Every Ram TRX, every Raptor, every Silverado ZR2, every single one traces its DNA back to 1964 when Dodge decided to build a work truck with a drag racing engine.
They lost money doing it.
They built them by hand.
They only made 50.
And they changed the truck market forever.
The 426 wedge pickup lasted less than 2 years in production.
The Hemi replaced it.
Muscle cars got all the attention.
And for decades, these trucks were forgotten.
Just weird Mopar oddities that a few collectors knew about.
But that is what makes them special.
They were not built because they made business sense.
They were built because some engineers at Dodge thought, “What if we put a race engine in a pickup truck and then they actually did it 50 times?”
Today, finding one is like finding a unicorn.
Most people do not even know to look for them.
They see a 1960s Dodge pickup and think work truck.
They do not see the 365 horsepower beast underneath.
That original customer who called his dealer in 1964, the one who paid $1,235 in cash for the high performance package, he got one of the rarest factory trucks ever built, a piece of history, the first muscle truck and probably the best $1,235 he ever spent.
