Built by a group of young Chrysler engineers from the remains of a rusted-out ’49 Plymouth business coupe, The High & Mighty changed the sport of drag racing forever.

Note: One of the great things about this business is the opportunity to hang out with your heroes, as I did back in 2006 when, as Detroit Editor of HOT ROD magazine, I met at length with original members of the Ramchargers, including Dick Burke, Ray Kobe, Tom Hoover, and others to prepare a story on their groundbreaking race car, The High and Mighty. (You can read the story here.) Their photos, materials, and priceless stories made this piece possible as well. -MCG 

The High & Mighty, the bizarre-looking but revolutionary drag car built by the Ramchargers, a Detroit car club made up of Chrysler engineers, raced for only two seasons. It made its first major appearance at the 1959 NHRA Nationals in Detroit, where it was painted an unflattering shade of blue-green primer and called the Ram Rod. For the following year at the Detroit Nationals, it was painted refrigerator white, carried sponsorship from a local Plymouth dealer, and it was sporting a new name: The High & Mighty (a pop culture reference to a John Wayne film of the era). But in the short time the High & Mighty raced, it had a tremendous influence on the sport. Here are just a few of the ways.

+   The young Mopar engineers recognized that just as a high center of gravity makes a vehicle tippy when cornering, transferring weight from the inside to the outside wheels, it will transfer weight from the front to the rear under acceleration, improving traction. And with the skinny, primitive tires and unprepared tracks of the era, cars needed all the forward bite they could get. On the H&M, the frame rails were jacked up more than a foot off the pavement and the engine was mounted high in the chassis with the crankshaft a full 36 inches off the ground. The innovation was extremely effective and at the ’60 Nationals, most of the top cars were now sporting the high-in-the-air stance. The NHRA rulebook soon placed a cap on this trend, limiting crankshaft height to 24 inches.

+   The car’s wild-looking intake manifold was originally a dyno test piece from Chrysler’s research program on ram tuning (see our feature on Chrysler ram induction here). The club members grabbed the leftover manifold, adjusted the runners to the desired length,  and bolted it to their 354 cubic-inch Chrysler hemi V8, which they had reclaimed from a warranty pile. In doing so, they introduced the tunnel-ram intake manifold to drag racing.

+   The exhaust headers were tuned using the same empirical formula, along with a megaphone shape they had discovered in a technical paper on British motorcycle engines. According to Dick Burke of the Ramchargers, the Ram Rod was the loudest car on the property at the ’59 Nationals.

+   At the rear of their ’49 Plymouth business coupe, the club members moved the axle forward nearly a foot, shortening the wheelbase for greater load transfer and shifting the weight distribution to the rear.  This same mod was later used to great effect on the Chrysler factory altered-wheelbase drag cars in ’65. Adding coil springs from the rear of an old Buick, the softest they could find, they devised what must be the first four-link rear suspension ever seen in drag racing, engineering their system for maximum adjustability (above). It would be another decade or more before adjustable four-link suspensions really caught hold in the sport.

While the Ramchargers’ club car, built to race in the NHRA’s C/Altered category, didn’t win its eliminator bracket at the Nationals in ’59 or ’60, it drew plenty of attention, claiming top speed of the meet in its class in ’59 and smashing the national record in ’60. But for all its technical innovations, the car was probably even more influential in other ways. First, it gave the Ramchargers club members a name and a reputation throughout the Chrysler Corporation. And the car was Chrysler’s introduction to the sport of drag racing, where the automaker, recently renamed Stellantis, remains involved to this day.

When you attend a vintage car show or nostalgia race today, you may well come across the High & Mighty II (below), a faithful recreation of the trendsetting drag car constructed by the Chrysler Employees Motorsports Association (CEMA). Some of the car’s components, including the crazy intake manifold and the lab-style electric tachometer, are from the original. It’s a special piece of drag racing history, so be sure to look it over.