Chrysler couldn’t help themselves when it came to rubbing in the success, as seen here in this old advertisement
Chrysler made a lot of different Hemi engines, and still do to this day technically. My personal favourites are the older 331-354-392 engines, based mostly on the fact that variety of the aftermarket parts available for that era is incredibly vast. One might think that a wide variety would mean there’s big competition and therefore lower prices. That might be true in comparison to parts available for, say, the 426 Hemi, but that’s a world that I’m even further distanced from. For me, it has always been, and will probably always be, the original Chevy small block V8. They made them forever and installed them in vehicles starting in 1955 and ending in 2002. Sure, they made many changes, but the same basic shape, idea and parts interchange was mostly there. I have a coffee can full of rocker arms, another full of pushrods, and one full of lifters that aren’t even technically reusable, but they came as part of a bulk deal one time and scrap price may skyrocket someday. Most of the stock cylinder heads sucked, but the aftermarket is more than stockpiled with thousands of options for any combination. Sure the valve covers leak, and they wipe out cams fairly regularly, but that gives a guy a reason to take the valve covers off and install new gaskets along with that new cam and lifters. How do you know if you’re going to make good power? A simple internet search will probably find you the exact combination you want, with dyno sheets to back it up. They’re that popular. Are they the best engine ever? Of course not. If they were, GM fans wouldn’t have run Chrysler Hemis in their funny cars. Spoiler alert: Ford couldn’t step up to the plate, either.
The Chrysler Hemi, specifically the 426, was a game-changer. If you didn’t love it back in the day, you hated it because it was a winner. The Chrysler Hemi was known to some as “the elephant motor,” and for good reason. It made tons of horsepower, tons of torque, and it was HUGE. Not only could it power an elephant, that is, one of the only animals big enough to actually fit it. A Chrysler Hemi was rarely installed into a vehicle, but rather crammed, with a sense of violence second only to the sensation when the gas pedal hit the floor once running. The Chrysler Hemi was such a perfect platform for performance that Keith Black used the design for his all-out drag race engines. If four-hundred and twenty-five horsepower was fun on the street, two thousand must have been a riot on the strip. Back in the day, you could lift the lid on any fibreglass funny car body, and under it was a Chrysler-designed Keith Black Hemi. Chevy Vega, Ford Pinto, anything. That was a big win for Chrysler, even if fans couldn’t tell from the stands.
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