Frank & Barb Payne's ’63 Plymouth Belvedere

Back in the Dec. ’97 issue of Car Craft , we picked the ’63 Plymouth Belvedere Super Stock as one of the Top 10 musclecars of all time. In the “Show of Muscle” story, we only gave a sprinkling of what these cars were all about, so here’s a better look at the mighty ’63 Max Wedge.

Frank and Barb Payne’s Ruby Red ’63 Belvedere looks just as it did the day it rolled off the showroom floor at Brown & Sons Chrysler in Hatboro, Pennsylvania. This B-body is a good example of a typical Max Wedge car, yet in comparison to other musclecars of the era, it is far from typical. Standard fare for this car was a high-strung, 11.0:1, dual-quad-fed 426-cube V-8—the wedge-headed predecessor to the Hemi—that belted out 415 hp’s worth of grunt.

The Max Wedge’s exhaust was routed through odd-looking cast-iron headers and then dumped into a special exhaust system shod with cutouts. A Borg-Warner T-85 heavy-duty three-speed manual trans piped power to a 3.91:1-geared Sure-Grip rearend, but the factory-fitted, mega-narrow bias-ply rear tires provided little traction. To remedy traction woes, many Max Wedge Mopars were immediately fitted with a set of cheater slicks. It’s interesting to note that although Frank and Barb’s ’63 Belvedere scoots to an 11.83 at 115.68 mph, the car was not factory-equipped with basic safety items such as seatbelts or outside rearview mirrors. Inside the cabin, things were kept to a minimum to save weight and to help offset the cost of the added Max Wedge engine option. A bench seat gave room for rumps to rest, and if you didn’t opt for radio delete, a super-basic AM radio generated tunes when the rear tires weren’t singing.

At the time we wrote this story, the Paynes’ Belvedere has a scant 6,850 miles on the odometer, but that doesn’t mean that the car hasn’t been enjoyed. During the first few years of its life it was regularly Friday-night cruised, but shortly thereafter it served as a dragstrip warrior where it racked up many of its miles a quarter-mile at a time. Now, years later, the car has been perfectly restored right down to the proper finky-looking clips, hoses, and trim tags. But just because this is a showpiece doesn’t mean that it’s horded away in a dusty museum. Rather, the Paynes cruise their Max Wedge monster at street-machine events such as the ’97 Car Craft Summer Cruise in Lincoln, Nebraska. During the show, gaggles of giddy gearheads giggled with glee as Frank cackled the 11.0:1 Max Wedge during cruise time. We just wish Frank would have melted the meats into molten goo during the burnout contest!