The 1956 Fury was Plymouth’s first stand-alone model that was marketed specifically on performance.

On January 10, 1956 at the Chicago Auto Show, the Plymouth Fury made its official debut. But on that same day around 1,250 miles south of McCormick Place on the Chicago lakefront, another debut was taking place at Daytona Beach, Florida. There, a Fury driven by noted race driver Phil Walters, aka Ted Tappett, ran a two-way average of 124.01 mph, providing the sensational copy material for a national advertising campaign to introduce Plymouth’s first high-performance model. A month later in the Daytona Beach Speed Trials, a modified Fury ran 143.596 mph.

That year, Plymouth had introduced its first overhead-valve V8, the A Series. (In ’55, Plymouth offered a Dodge-based V8.) Unlike its Chrysler, DeSoto, and Dodge siblings with their dual rocker shafts and hemispherical combustion chambers, the lower-cost Plymouth V8 adopted a single-shaft design with modified combustion chambers that came to be known as “polyspherical.”

For the Fury, Plymouth engineers chose a 303 cubic-inch version from Chrysler of Canada to replace the 277 cubic-inch V8 used in standard U.S. production. They added a more agressive camshaft with stiffer valve springs, a four-barrel intake manifocld with a Carter WCFB carburetor, domed pistons with a 9.25:1 compression ratio, and a dual exhaust system. The combination was rated at 240 hp at 4,800 rpm, a good 40 hp better than the 277 CID V8. For $750, a dealer-installed kit with dual four-barrels and an even racier camshaft was available, and it was said to produce 270 hp.

The Fury was far more than an engine package, however. Here was a stand-alone performance model with its own distinctive features, most noticeably the giant trim panels with embossed and gold-anodized aluminum inserts. Just one exterior color was offered in ’56, Eggshell White, paired with a color-coordinated deluxe interior. Along with the special V8, a heavy duty clutch, differential, springs, shocks, and brakes lent credibility to the performance angle. Road & Track magazine reported a 0-60 mph time of 9.0 seconds and 16.6 seconds at 82 mph in the quarter mile—which made it one of the hottest cars on the American road that year.

With the Cadillac and Oldsmobile V8s of 1949, the ’51 Chrysler Hemi, and all the rest, performance was becoming a major selling theme in the Motor City in the ’50s. The Fury was something different, though, as an early example of a specific model focused on performance. In that regard, the Fury foreshadowed the muscle car movement of a decade later. A sales success and an image builder for the Plymouth brand, the Fury name was soon assimilated into the standard product line, where it remained through 1989 as the Gran Fury.