The 50-Truck Dodge Muscle Pickup That Buyers Had To Pay For In Full, Upfront
Many pickup truck enthusiasts will agree that the classic Dodge trucks are some of the best. That’s especially the case if they have a big, throaty V8. The truck we’re going to talk about here not only has exactly that, but it is a bit of a forgotten pioneer.
High-Performance Pickup Trucks Are An Integral Part Of American Car Culture Now
Take a look at the pickup truck market over the last few decades, and you’ll see it’s not short of high-performance models. It seems like almost all Pickup Trucks need to have a high-performance variant, or at least one that’s a bit of a sleeper. It can be easy to forget sometimes that there was a point when pickup trucks were only supposed to be steady, utility vehicles.
The Dodge D100 Custom Sports Special Is A Pioneering High-Performance Truck
When talking about early high-performance pickup trucks, most enthusiasts will cite the GMC Syclone. Those who are a lot more into their pickups will go back further and mention the Dodge Lil’ Red Express. While the Lil’ Red Express is a great example of an early performance pickup, it actually wasn’t the first time Mopar had given this idea a go. In the mid-1960s, more than a decade before the Lil’ Red Express existed, Dodge could sell you a version of the D-100 that was legitimately fast. That was the D-100 Custom Sports Special. While most Dodge D-100s used a slant-6 engine, the Custom Sports Special came with a 318 cubic inch V8. This gave the D100 platform enough power to be able to light up the rear tires, something completely unheard of in a truck at the time.
The improvements didn’t stop at the engine, either. D100 Custom Sports Specials got a more luxurious interior than regular D100s. Mopar raided its parts bin for the high-quality interior components, taking the bucket seats from the Dodge Dart GT and the center console from the Dodge Polara. It also got power steering, power brakes, and a tachometer that displayed up to 6,000 rpm.
What did you pay for all this extra equipment? The Custom Sports Special was a $235 option, on top of the D100’s base price of around $2,000.
The High Performance Package Option Gave This Truck The Ability To Tear It Up On The Drag Strip
Anyone who bought the D100 Custom Sports Special could get an expensive option that turned this truck into a drag strip demon. That’s the High Performance Package (HPP), a $1,235 option that gave this truck a major engine upgrade. The early 1964 models with this upgrade had a 413 cubic inch “Street Wedge” engine that produced 360 horsepower. That changed to a 426 cubic inch version of the engine later on in 1964, producing 365 horsepower. That big-block power meant a 0-60 mph time of under 8 seconds and a quarter-mile time of less than 16.
If you wanted one of these trucks, you had to be serious about owning one. Dodge insisted that you had to pay the entire cost of the truck upfront before they even started building it. That total cost was around $3,500 when you added the cost of the Custom Sports Special trim and the HPP package to the D100’s base price. That’s the equivalent of around $29,000–$31,000 today.
Building Them Required A Huge Amount Of Hand-Fabrication
To create these super-powerful big-block pickup trucks, Dodge had to go to incredible lengths. It used a level of hand-fabrication that you wouldn’t see on a lot of sports cars and supercars, let alone on a pickup truck from the 1960s. Huge modifications were made to the D100’s frame so it could take the massive Street Wedge engine. This included getting rid of the original transmission frame crossmember and replacing it with a new one, building and installing new motor mounts, installing new torque rods for the new 3:91 rear end the Street Wedge engine needed, and literally pounding out a dent in the firewall to allow for the exhaust manifold to clear properly. The power steering and power brakes were also not part of the regular D100 platform, and so had to be installed as part of these modifications.
Why was so much hand-fabrication needed? The entire performance package was an afterthought. Dodge just decided to put a Street Wedge engine in one of its pickup trucks and crossed the engineering bridge when it came time to actually put the engine in.
Barely Any HPP Trucks Were Made
If you want to find a Dodge D100 Custom Sports Special with the HPP package, you’ll have to look pretty hard. Dodge only ever made 50 trucks with the HPP package, and 31 of those were D100s. That easily makes it one of the rarest collectible Mopar cars around—rarer even than a lot of homologation specials and some uncommon order options from the 1960s. When you look at how niche this truck was back in the 1960s and how much effort Dodge needed to go to in order to build it, it’s no wonder it was produced in such limited numbers.
Its Legacy Lives On In Today’s Super Powerful Muscle Trucks
2027 Ram 1500 SRT TRX
The HPP-equipped Dodge D-100 Custom Sports Special may have only lasted for a couple of years. But its legacy has been kept alive by the latest generation of powerful muscle trucks. The most obvious spiritual successor has to be the Ram TRX. Returning for the 2027 model year, the latest version of the Ram TRX features a 777 horsepower supercharged V8, propelling it from 0-60 mph in just 3.5 seconds. The Ford F-150 Raptor R also carries on that legacy, with its 700 horsepower supercharged V8.
Both of these trucks are in a whole different league of power from the HPP-equipped D100s. But that same spirit of putting extraordinary levels of power (for the time) in a regular pickup truck platform is what drove Ram and Ford to build these vehicles.
Source: Dodge, CSS Registry, Ford, Ram Trucks, The Autopian
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