Chrysler 300 4th Gen (Letter Series)

These two years are the last of the Virgil Exner shape, cleaned up and calmed down after the fins came off in 1962. The 1963 car is crisper than anything Chrysler had built in a decade: flat sides, a squared-up greenhouse, a full-width grille with the 300 medallion at its centre, and none of the sculptural drama of the 300F. Exner had already left the corporation by the time it reached showrooms and Elwood Engel's influence was arriving, so the 1963 and 1964 cars sit in a genuine handover period and read as a bridge between two design languages. The 1964 update is subtle, mostly grille texture and trim. What identifies a letter car in these years is detail rather than shape, because the cheaper non-letter 300 shared the body: the letter medallion, the specific grille treatment, and inside, the leather bucket seats, the full-length console and the instrument panel. The 1963 car's squared steering wheel is the one piece of pure period eccentricity in the cabin, and it is the fastest way to date a Chrysler interior from across a showroom.

Neither of these cars raced, and the reason is specific rather than general. In 1963 and 1964 Chrysler ran one of the most serious factory competition programmes in America, but it was aimed at the lightest cars in the corporation, not the heaviest. The 426 Max Wedge went into stripped Plymouth Savoys and Dodge 330s that weighed hundreds of pounds less than a 300, and in 1964 the 426 Race Hemi arrived and Richard Petty won the Daytona 500 with it. A two-ton leather-lined luxury coupe had no class to run in and no reason to try. The closest the letter car got was a paperwork connection: a handful of 1963 300Js could be special-ordered with a 415hp 426 Wedge, the same displacement that was winning at the strip, though almost nobody did it. There is one more link and it is a slightly rueful one. A Chrysler 300 paced the 1963 Indianapolis 500 with Sam Hanks driving, but it had to be a non-letter 300 Sport convertible, because the 300J that year was built as a hardtop only.

These are the letter cars history walked past, and the reasons are worth knowing. The 300J was too rare and too expensive to register with anybody, and the 300K was sold cheaply enough that it stopped feeling special, which is the trap Chrysler set for itself when it put the 300 badge on an ordinary car. The name's public moment in 1963 went to that ordinary car: a non-letter 300 Sport convertible paced the Indianapolis 500 and Chrysler sold a Pace Setter commemorative edition of it, while the actual letter car of that year sat in the same showroom with no convertible and no publicity. The other thing the 1963 Chryslers are remembered for has nothing to do with speed. This was the model year Lynn Townsend's five-year, 50,000-mile powertrain warranty arrived, an industry first that forced General Motors and Ford to follow and did more for Chrysler's reputation than any letter car ever did. The 300J and 300K are footnotes to their own era, which is precisely why the people who collect them are so pleased with themselves.

An honest 300K is one of the easier old American cars to live with, which is not something you can say about most of the letter series. The 413 will run past 100,000 miles without drama and rebuilds cheaply when it finally asks. The TorqueFlite is one of the best automatics of its era. The torsion-bar front end needs bushings and an alignment and then behaves. The 1963 and 1964 C-body is a well-sorted, well-built car, and this was the era of Chrysler's five-year warranty, which the engineering had to earn. Where it asks for patience is the letter-specific hardware. A cross-ram setup that has not been synchronised properly will run rough and make the whole car feel unwell when the problem is a linkage adjustment. The push-button shift cable on a 1963 car drifts and wants a knowing hand. Rust is the usual full-size Mopar story in the lower quarters, trunk floor and cowl. Leather, console and medallions are what you will hunt. Drum brakes and two tons mean a long view down the road, and that is about the extent of the compromise.