(Since we’ll be live broadcasting the 2014 Holley NHRA National Hot Rod Reunion next week we figured that we’d relive one of our favorite car features on this Saturday before the race. Chip Brown’s monster 300K is one of the coolest cars we have ever featured…) While standing at the wall shooting photos at the 2012 Holley NHRR, I heard a blown car fire up in the staging lanes and head toward the track. Having been around drag strips for as long and as often as I have been, I’ve developed a decent ear for stuff that sounds good, stuff that sounds weak, and stuff that sounds like it is getting ready to suck the Earth into a vortex of doom on the way by. This 1964 Chrysler 300K falls into the last category. When it rounded the bend so I could actually see it, my first thoughts were literally, “That’s one mean bastard, right there.” Turns out my ears weren’t lying. That blower ain’t window dressing kiddos, this 4200lb monster was ripping off 9.0-second runs at over 150mph all weekend in near 100-degree heat and humidity that Navy frog men would have complained about.

So how in the hell did a guy come up with the idea of taking an all-steel 1964 Chrysler 300K, one of just 3,100 made, and turning it into a full bore killer drag car that has run as quick as 8.80?  Chip Brown is the owner and driver so we went right to the source for this information. We found the menacing black Mopar sitting at the end of the pits, appropriately down by the Beech Bend Raceway scale house. Chip was more than happy to oblige for photos and an interview about the car, which has an awesome history.

Chip is the owner of a repair shop in Pennsville, NJ and a man who has been in drag racing for decades. The fact that he owns this car is due to his nitro fueled exploits as the co-owner and wrench on a Top Fuel Dragster in the 1970s, a car called, “Nirvana” that was the 1976 NHRA Division One champ. “Bill Clark worked at DuPont and he was one of the guys on the Top Fuel team. He bought this car at the 1964 New York Auto Show, which was held at Madison Square Garden,” Chip said. Clark was apparently one of those rare characters who lived the lives of 10 men and was an inspirational, entertaining, and fantastic guy to be around. According to Chip, he was an ace machinist, bar room fighter, ballroom dancer, WWII veteran, and someone who lived life to the fullest. As Mr. Clark got on in years, he developed Parkinson’s disease and eventually passed on to the great strip in the sky. After his passing, Chip bought the car, still in factory stock form from his estate and it sat at his repair shop for years.

Chip would fire the car up once a year, maybe take it around the block and stuff, but that was it. After years of this, Brown decided that the car needed to be restored and it could then be cruised around in style with the factory 413ci wedge engine providing the power. Then a funny thing happened when he was dropping it off at the body shop for the restoration. He noticed the tires. “Man, as I was dropping it off I just kept looking at the skinny little tires on the car and thought maybe we should do something different with it,” Brown said. That something different turned out to be the first steps in making what you see here on BangShift today.

The first iteration of the car after it was painted was a pretty decent Pro Street cruiser. The 413 Chrysler engine was dumped in favor of a 502ci GM crate motor, Turbo 400 transmission and a set of 18″ wide Hoosier street tires. As a guy who never really let the drag racing bug get totally out of his system, Brown eventually found his way back to the drag strip and the car was knocking down high 11-second elapsed times with that streetable combo in it. With some gentle prodding from his pal and ace fabricator Harry Messick (more one him in a minute) the 502 suddenly grew a blower and a couple of carbs on top of it. With gasoline running through that combo the guys ran 10.50s out of the box and eventually torqued and tuned their way down into the 9.40s with a gasoline burning engine in the car. That’s pretty damned impressive when we again remind you that this is a 4,200lb car that is all steel aside from the front and rear bumpers…and they still LOOK heavy!

All the while, as the car was getting faster and more serious, Harry Messick, a guy that Chip Brown first took drag racing when he was just a 15 year old kid was updating the roll cage, adding sub-frame connectors (remember, this is a uni-body car!), and working side by side with Chip to keep the car as functional in the drag racing and in the traditional sense as possible. The car has actual glass in all the windows, which still wind up and down, it has a full interior, dash, the works. Up until last year, when the guys starting running over 150mph it had the factory seats in it! Brown, in a move which we think was smart, put a set of racing seats in the car out of concern about his safety in the event something were to happen.

Messick has done an awesome job with the installation of the Fat Man front end, all of the cage work, and even getting the current bad ass engine combo together. Oh, you’re wondering what actually pushes this huge steel car into the 8’s are you?

Sticking with a Chevy style combo, the boys have a 540ci mill based on a Merlin block between the fenders. It wears an 8-71 teflon stripped blower from BDS on top, which is forcing 18lbs of boost into the motor. The heads are from RHS, ignition by MSD, and the fuel system is an Enderle mechanical FI setup. Chip said that Enderle was fantastic to work with and have been with them step by step as they’ve improved the motor through various means, like bumping the compression from 9.5:1 to the current 10.5:1 setup. They made a pill change to get their baseline and have not looked back since. The crispness of the exhaust note that this car has is literally mechanical music to our ears. The guys have done a great job tuning the engine because it leaps to life with a roar few other blown alky plants at Bowling Green had! To move this much tonnage that quickly down the track and at over 150mph means that the engine is making more than 1500hp. They have never dyno’d it, but who the hell cares. The proof is in the pudding. The quickest run ever was made at Atco, NJ and it was an 8.86/153mph blast.

If we had to pick the hardest working parts on the car, we’d pick three. First would be the brakes, which are Wilwoods on all four corners. Chip readily admits that he likes having the stock, extra wide brake pedal in the car because hauling this baby down from 150mph is an exercise in leg strength! The guys have killed a rear end of two before going to a full tilt moly funny car style piece that is packed with a 4.10 geared Moser center section. Lastly, the driveshaft in this car is a story unto itself. Brown orders a new shaft from Inland Empire Driveline in California once a year, because he’s killed enough of them to know what the service life it. “The driveshaft in the car is 68″ long,” he said with a laugh. “I had a hard time finding anyone to make one that would work because they are so long that they start to whip around at the speeds we’re going. A few years ago a guy in Florida told me that he could make me a carbon fiber shaft that would live in the car. Well, we put it in and on the very first lap at Atco it exploded into dust and the car didn’t move six inches. I shipped him the pieces and he gave me my money back.”

Chip Brown is a hell of a nice guy and his life long friendship with Harry Messick has resulted in one of coolest, most evil, and gnarly drag race cars we have ever seen. Messick’s work on this beast is top shelf and Brown’s insistence on keeping it as factory stock appearing (outside of the blown alky engine!) is fantastic. Watching it plant those huge Hoosier slicks and Weld dual bead lock wheels sold us instantly on the fact that this was a serious car. It didn’t just yank the front end up three inches and make noise going down the track, it leapt off the starting line and accelerated with a fury we never saw coming. Cars with open piped blown alky engines are NOT sleepers, but we would have won a lot of bets in the stands if we laid money down that this steel barge would run 8s! As Clark said, “It looks like a Valiant on steroids.” It runs like a Valiant that thinks it is the Incredible Hulk!

HIT THE LINK TO SEE A COMPLETE GALLERY OF THIS CAR —