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One revision: "(admittedly, Ford ignored the street rod, grassroots circle track and sportsman drag racing markets for 30+ years, squandering the huge lead built by the flathead).
An explanation for our younger Car Crafters:
Ford's flathead V8 was "the standard" grassroots motorsports powerplant in the 1940s and early 1950s.
When GM released the first of the high-compression Kettering V8s (Olds and Cadillac), the flathead was challenged but not toppled. Chrysler's early hemi also emerged as a contender, but the new OHV V8s were not universally accepted by grassroots Car Crafters for a variety of reasons.
Hudson, Oldsmobile and Offenhauser dominated "professional" racing in the USA at the time. Chevy was an old man's car then, saddled with nothing but inline sixes derided as "Stovebolts."
Ford's first OHV V8--the infamous Y-Block--beat the SBC to market by a year, but it was not easily retrofited into earlier Fords. Few high performance parts were available. It also suffered from a somewhat odd design.
Ed Cole--an engineering genius-- was busy in Chevrolet's camp, working on the new SBC. Admittedly, the Chevy design was cheaper, lighter and simpler than the Y-Block, the Olds, the Hemis and the Cadillac. It also would also easily swap in place of a flathead.
But the real key to the SBC's success began with Zora Arkus-Duntov, another engineering and marketing genius who was attracted to GM by the new Corvette. Zora believed that to save the floundering Corvette, the factory had to supply performance parts for the new "RPO V8." (Perhaps more instrumental in saving the Corvette was the introduction of Ford's Thunderbird in 1955 --an event which bought Zora time enough to implement his V8 plans)
Chevrolet also jumped into factory-sponsored racing with the Corvette and the "Motormatic" '55 Chevrolet. Although it had few successes, its exploits were heavily promoted in advertising. Chrysler's Hemi was starting to dominate stock car racing, but Ford created a racing organization which became the foundation for much of what we take for granted in NASCAR today. However, the Ford approach was always geared to directly supporting a limited number of professional racers with specialized racing parts and cash.
In 1957, Ford was well on its way to winning the "Grand National" Championship (even the legendary Smokey Yunick wrenched for Ford during part of '57) when GM's president proposed a BAN on factory-sponsored racing and speed contests through an automobile manufacturers' association. Ford's boss, Henry Ford II, was duped into signing on to the ban. He immediately killed the racing program. The leftovers survived as the Holman-Moody Company.
It didn't help that Ford's right hand man at the time was the stodgy Robert McNamara. McNamara--who later plunged us deeper into Vietnam as John Kennedy's secretary of defense--didn't understand high performance and dreamed of more sensible cars like the 1960 Ford Falcon, and of smaller front-wheel-drive models. Volkswagen, not Corvette, interested McNamara.
Chevy's in-house racers, such as Zora and Vince Piggins, took advantage of corporate bureaucracy to "keep the back door open." They kept on developing thinly-veiled racing parts, many of which were sold at cheap prices to grassroots racers.
Both Ford and Chevy introduced "big block" engines in the late 50s. Ford's superior "FE" spelled the end of development for the already dated Y-Block. Ford racers were forced to switch architectures twice in less than ten years. But Zora hated Chevy's heavy "W" truck motor and focused most of the development money on the Corvette-friendly SBC.
The Racing Ban was a notorious failure. Pontiac's Bunkie Knudsen openly and obviously cheated on it. Without serious factory competition, Pontiacs began rampaging at the strip and on the oval track. MoPar ramped up activity in NHRA, mainly through a group of factory engineers called "the Ramchargers." Zora and Vince kept pumping out large quantities of "special" parts for Corvettes. Bill Mitchell funded a SBC-powered "Sting Ray" racing sports car out of his own pocket. It was merely a new body hiding a stillborn factory racer Zora built before the Ban. Mitchell's design later became the basis for the 1963-67 Corvette Stingray.
In 1962, after being rebuffed by Enzo Ferrari and seeing how he'd been duped in 1957, Henry Ford II publically repudiated the Racing Ban. Thus began the most incredible factory assault on motorsports the world had ever seen. Before it was over in 1970, Ford, or Ford-associated operations such as Shelby American, had won virtually every major motorsports championship. And the Ford-funded Cosworth DFV V8 became the dominant international open-wheel competition engine for another decade after that.
But in 1963, GM's board reigned in its Racing Ban cheating--somewhat. Overt efforts, such as at Pontiac and the emerging responses to Ford and MoPar at Chevrolet were killed. One survivor was the MARK II/MARK IV V8, a loose revision of Chevrolet's failed "W" motor. This 1963 "mystery motor," also known as the "Porcupine" and later as the "Semi-Hemi" and the "Rat," was first developed to beat Ford's FE 427, Pontiac's 421 and MoPar's Max Wedge/Ramcharger 426 RB wedge.
Prevented from openly supporting professional competition, Zora and Vince kept Chevy's back door parts operation open. Chevrolet also expanded its marine operations. It covertly funded Jim Hall's revolutionary Chaparral Can-Am racers. It debugged the Rat's design and even cast a few Rats in aluminum. It evaded corporate edicts through enterprising dealers like Don Yenko, Baldwin-Motion and Fred Gibb with a gaping loophole called Central Office Production Orders (COPO). In other words, the in-house racers at Chevy went underground.
From 1962-1970, Ford paid an all-star professional cast millions to win for the Blue Oval. But Henry II became concerned by the safety-emissions regulatory storm brewing in Washington D.C. and his responsibility to Ford's shareholders. After some turbulent hearings by a Congressional committee, Henry reacted by slashing the racing program. When Henry fired Bunkie Knudsen (who had left GM after being bypassed for promotion), Ford lost its biggest racing fan. MoPar also severely cut back its sponsorships and then killed the Hemi. An era was over.
When the racing door shut at Ford, it slammed--except for modest foreign operations and a bit of truck racing in Baja. Without a clandestine infrastructure such as Zora and Vince had built to support the Corvette and no powerful champions arguing for selling parts to the grassroots, Ford's performance and racing reputation was in freefall. Some of the in-house racers survived at Ford. Others, such as Jack Roush, ended up outside the corporate mainstream.
The professional racers Ford and MoPar had paid now needed to find other ways to fund their race teams. Some switched immediately to Chevy because of cheaper parts. Other waited until the supplies of Ford and MoPar racing parts dwindled.
The flood of Chevy parts Zora and Vince had nurtured, some shrewd under-the-table deals, and favorable rules changes by major sanctioning bodies combined to give Chevrolet over a decade of free reign in oval track racing.
In the minor-leagues, GM made the only "full frame" midsized cars (except for some huge "midsize" Fords from 1972-1979) and the small-track rulesmakers, pursuing cheaper "junkyard formulas" not far removed from the days of the flatheads, didn't accommodate Ford and MoPar racers as much as NASCAR had in the 1960s. In combination with the "half frame" Camaro/Nova (an idea first used by Holman and Moody) it was advantage: Chevrolet, on the short tracks.
At the strip, Chevy edged Ford in the sportsman classes, mainly on the strength of its grassroots parts operation, better parts interchangability, harsh factoring decisions, well-placed assistance deals, and the continued success of its Mustang-fighter--the Camaro.
After the muscle car era ended in an early '70s haze of emission laws, inflation and insurance surcharges, grassroots street rodding reemerged. The SBC quickly became the dominant power source in pre-'48 rods, based on the vast supply of junkyard engines and ease of fitting one in place of an obsolete flathead. Chevrolet helped this trend by agressively marketing the "targetmaster" crate engine--not a performance engine out of the box, but one which could benefit from 30+ years of racing parts development.
It also didn't help that from 1973-1982, Ford offered no real high performance street car and little in factory performance parts. By 1981, the few professionals left running Fords in US competition were reportedly scrounging junkyards in Australia for useable Cleveland heads.
The irony is while Chevrolet never won LeMans four times in a row or even one Formula One race or produced any outrageous engines like the Boss 429, Boss 302, SOHC 427, 427 High-Riser, 427 Tunnel-Port or the Boss 351, its little backdoor "Corvette parts" operation effectively trumped Ford's huge lead among grassroots car crafters and racers.
Although Ford's done a lot since 1981 to catch up, it's still a Chevy world for most rodders and Car Crafters. One wonders had Ford nurtured its motorsports business in the grassroots of the sport consistently from the 1940s whether Chevy would now even be a blip on the screen. If its not TURBOCHARGED, you're not finished yet . . . .
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