The ’80s was a crazy time for fashion, hair styles, and automotive accessories. Here’s an awkward moment in aftermarket shifters, the Hurst Lightning Rods.

Part of the fun in looking through old scrapbooks is having a good laugh with ourselves for the fads and styles of times past. Jeez, what we were thinking? Such could be the case in automotive fashions, too. Take the Hurst Lightning Rods, an aftermarket performance shifter marketed in the 1980s. This gadget employed three shift levers to accomplish everything that a single lever could do.

​Hurst’s inspiration for the Lightning Rods was the Lenco transmission (above) used in drag racing in those years, notably in the NHRA Pro Stock category. A highly specialized, purpose-built piece of straight-line racing equipment, the Lenco employed a series of planetary gear assemblies that stacked together in modular fashion, with an individual shift lever for each gearset—simple, positive, and utterly foolproof. Hurst took this race-only setup and adapted it to production automatic transmissions, allowing road drivers to emulate their drag strip heroes, grabbing a separate lever for each upshift.

​The Lightning Rods system was set up to work like any ordinary automatic gear selector, more or less, with a conventional PRND shift pattern (as shown in the top photo). The difference was in the two additional levers: the far right lever and release button performed the 1-2 upshift, while the middle lever and button performed the 2-3 upshift. Or the driver could simply leave the lever in D for Drive or OD for Overdrive and drive normally. In that regard, the Lightning Rods setup was not unlike the Hurst Dual Gate aka “His ‘n Her” shifters of previous years.

Hurst marketed the Lightning Rods through its regular speed shop channels in several versions, including kits for the GM F-Body Camaro and Firebird and a universal model with a small, stand-alone floor console. Perhaps the most familiar application was as standard equipment in the 1983-84 Hurst/Olds–the final iterations of the Hurst-equipped muscle cars. Some 3,001 models in 1983 and 3,500 units in 1984 were built before Hurst/Olds production concluded for good. In hindsight the Lightning Rods look like a silly idea, but often, silly can be fun.

Catch Dodge Fever with this famous advertising campaign for the sleek new 1968 Charger.
What a difference a year makes—and a new set of body stampings.
The first-generation Dodge Charger of 1966-67 was a perfectly fine car, generously equipped and attractively priced. But the public never warmed to it, nor to its quirky fastback styling. Sales amounted to barely 37,000 units in ’66 and fewer than 16,000 in ’67. Rising to the challenge, the Dodge styling team led by Bill Brownlie created all-new sheet metal for the B-body based package that boasted a sleek coke-bottle profile. The fresh new look was a winner, moving nearly 100,000 cars in 1968. And in hindsight, they created one of the more memorable designs in Mopar history.

Dodge was sporting a new ad campaign for ’68 as well, crafted by the automaker’s longtime agency BBDO, the same firm that invented the Pepsi Generation and Ring Around the Collar. A rework of the ’66-’67 Dodge Rebellion campaign, Dodge Fever was fronted by a spunky spokesmodel with a white cowboy hat and miles of personality, Joan Parker. She would serve in this role through 1970 when the Dodge Material campaign was launched.
There was no shortage of muscle in the extensive powertrain catalog for the ’68 Charger, which included the 440 Magnum V8 and the mighty 426 Street Hemi. Naturally, either engine could be coupled to the famed Torqueflite automatic or Chrysler’s beefy A-883 New Process four-speed. But in this original commercial spot the humble 318 CID V8 gets all the glory, while the messaging is focused on the bold styling. Video follows.

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Plymouth cracked the youth market wide open in the late ’60s with a bold new marketing and branding strategy: Using cartoon characters to sell muscle cars.
The Road Runner, Plymouth’s 1968 entry in the Motor City’s muscle car wars, was based on two fresh but powerful insights about the exploding youth performance market.
First: Many young muscle car buyers, it turned out, cared little about luxury or convenience features. They wanted the most powerful drivetrain they could afford, stuffed into the cheapest (and lightest) package available. Recognizing this desire, Plymouth stripped the Road Runner to taxicab trim level—right down to rubber floor mats and ash-tray hubcaps—to create the lowest-priced muscle car on the market. The list price was comfortably under $3,000, including the standard 383 CID big-block V8 and Hurst-shifted four-speed transmission. Naturally, the 440 CID Magnum and mighty 426 Street Hemi powerplants were available at extra cost.
Next: Plymouth recognized that this crop of young buyers didn’t identify with couples in evening wear or weekends at the country club, so those familiar images were banished from the print and television ads. To reach the baby boomers, the first generation of car buyers raised in front of the TV set, Plymouth borrowed and licensed (for $50,000, it is said) a beloved character from Saturday morning cartoons, the Road Runner. The quick and crafty bird was applied not only to the car’s ad campaign, but to the branding of the vehicle itself. Chrysler Corporation planned to sell 20,000 Road Runners that first year and sold 50,000.
As we all know, when the Road Runner and his nemesis Wile E. Coyote face off in a Warner Brothers cartoon, Road Runner always wins. And that’s just how it went in a whole series of Plymouth commercials, too, including this spot from 1969. There’s even an Acme Rocket Skate bit here. Video follows.

The 1974-78 Mustang II doesn’t get a lot of love from Ford enthusiasts—and that’s a shame, because it saved the breed from extinction.

From its original introduction at the New York World’s Fair in April of 1964, the Ford Mustang was one of the great success stories of the Motor City, with more than one million cars sold in the first 18 months. But in the following years, as the trend-setting design grew bigger, fatter, and more luxurious, its sales volume steadily slipped away as well. By 1973, the Mustang was now almost intermediate in size, and meanwhile, sales slipped to around 135,000 units. The pony car was no longer earning its place in the Ford lineup.

Ford executive Lee Iacocca, often called the father of the Mustang, observed that Mustang buyers had not abandoned the Mustang, but rather, the Ford Motor Company had abandoned them. For the 1974 model year, it was time for a reset. The economy was slowing and fuel prices were rising. The Mustang would be returned to its small-car roots.

​After Ford management studied a dozen or more packages based on the Pinto and Maverick platforms, Iaocca personally gave the green light to a Pinto-sized fastback coupe drafted by Lincoln-Mercury staff designer Howard “Buck” Mook. After nine years, there would finally be a Mustang hatchback. Meanwhile, market research identified a strong demand for a traditional notchback coupe, so designer Chuck Nesbitt spun off a handsome formal coupe version. The decision proved to be a wise one, as the coupe consistently outsold the three-door by a wide margin throughout the ’74-’78 production cycle.

More than a foot shorter than the ’73 Mustang and rolling on a 96.2-inch wheelbase, the Mustang II was loosely based on Ford’s Pinto subcompact platform, although Iacocca was quick to insist that the two cars actually shared few components. Among other key changes, the Mustang II used an independent front subframe (labeled the “toilet seat” by Ford engineers) to isolate the cabin from drivetrain noise. Engine choices the first year were limited to a 2.4-liter four with 85 horsepower and a German-built 2.8-liter V6 good for 105 hp. From ’75 on, a 5.0-liter V8 was available, but with just 122 hp, later bumped to 138 hp.

​The Mustang II’s cabin remained true to the original pony car theme with a sporty instrument panel, bucket seats, and a floor-mounted shifter and parking brake lever. Changes to the Mustang II package were relatively few and small over the five-year model run: parking lamps, fuel filler location, quarter windows, a few other items. No factory convertibles were offered, but there were Mach I, Cobra II, and King Cobra versions to provide some performance image, if not actual performance.

While it wasn’t a real performance car by any stretch of the imagination, the Mustang II proved to be the right car for the times. Iacocca and crew had found the sweet spot in price, style, and packaging for the Mustang buyer of the ’70s. Sales zoomed up to nearly 386,000 units for 1974, a level the Mustang hadn’t seen since 1967—and hasn’t matched since. There would be four more generations of the Ford Mustang, and they all owe their existence to the 1974-78 Mustang II.

To soup up its product line for 1963, the Studebaker Corporation returned to a familiar method: supercharging.
In preparing Studebaker for the 1963 model year, President Sherwood Egbert had a daunting task before him: How to inject new life and performance into a rapidly aging product line, and with very little budget to do it. Egbert reached for a method that, as as a former vice president of McCulloch Corporation, he knew well: supercharging.  McCulloch had spun off its supercharger business in 1958 to the Granatelli brothers, and in early 1962 the company, now known as Paxton Products, was acquired by the Studebaker Corporation. Meanwhile, Studebaker had some experience with blowers as well, on the McCulloch-equipped 1957-58 Golden Hawks. It was a natural fit all around.
The supercharger adopted by Studebaker for ’63 was the Paxton SN60, a simplified, fixed-ratio version of the original McCulloch VS57 blower, here  tuned to feed up to six pounds of boost into a sealed Carter AFB carb. When bolted to the aged but willing 289 CID Studebaker V8, the R2 Super Jet Thrust package, as it was called, was rated at 289 horsepower, nearly 50 hp more than the normally-aspirated R1 version. (There were also R3, R4, and R5 engines, and adventures at Bonneville, but that’s another story.)
Available across the Studebaker model line—Lark, Cruiser, Gran Turismo Hawk, and the stunning new Avanti—the R2 blower setup provided satisfying midrange punch and a considerable jump in top speed, to 132 mph in the Lark and 140 mph in the Hawk. There’s bragging aplenty in the original Studebaker commercial below.