1970 Chrysler 300. Image courtesy OldCarBrochures.com.
Ahoy, matey! Lash the lanyard! Swab the decks! Port to quarters! Hard astern, more sailing gibberish, and full ahead! Captains of the Chrysler C-boats – make that C-bodies – have received summonses to navigate their land yachts to next year’s Chryslers at Carlisle, which has scheduled a celebration of the full-size Mopars.
Perhaps the only platform to be shared across four Chrysler divisions, the C-body designation officially debuted in 1965, though the basic architecture – a unit-body with a front subframe carrying torsion bars – dated back to the 1957 Chrysler, Dodge, and Plymouth lineups. It also proved rather adaptable, stretching in wheelbase from 119 inches to 127 inches and underpinning everything from Plymouths to Imperials. Plymouth and Dodge reserved the platform for its more exclusive cars – Fury, VIP, and Monaco among them – while Chrysler’s lineup consisted almost entirely of C-bodies during this time and Imperial only adopted it after retiring the D-body in 1967.
“They had a smooth ride but, thanks to their torsion bar suspensions, handled better than most, if not all, other large cars,” Eugene Calderaro wrote for Allpar. That’s despite the big-block V-8s that resided under the hood of many a Chrysler C-body – a lotta 383s, but also a smattering of 413s and 440s.
Major redesigns came in 1969 with the so-called fuselage styling and again in 1974 with the brougham era. While the former – with their loop bumpers, hideaway headlamps, and various sleek rooflines – sold well at a time when buyers were just beginning to look for comfort and luxury, the latter generation with its more anonymous styling and dated chassis couldn’t compete very well at a time of increasing gas prices and decreasing demand for large cars. The C-body thus made it through the 1977 model year before the M- and R-bodies took over the C-body’s more famous nameplates.
These days, enthusiasm for the C-bodies lives on through forums such as For C-Bodies Only and C-Body Dry Dock as well as through events like Chryslers at Carlisle corralling of C-bodies for next year’s event. The 2016 Carlisle Chrysler Nationals will take place July 15-17. For more information, visit CarlisleEvents.com.
from Hemmings Daily - News for the collector car enthusiast http://ift.tt/1PnFpS3
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