Plymouth SPORTS FURY
Daniel Harris’ Sport Fury was built at a ver y special time for Plymouth. It was the height of the Virgil Exner-inspired For ward Look era for Chrysler overall, the peak year for the fins (which were soon to die out) and, more significantly, a year of huge changes for the Plymouth brand.
For a start, it was moving factories, from the old Evansville facility – which was closed – to its new home at the St Louis plant, which narrowly missed being commissioned in time to build the 1959 cars.
There was also a corporate shake-up, with Chrysler’s Plymouth DeSoto division renamed to become the Plymouth, DeSoto Valiant division. Yep,
that Valiant. This, by the way, was also the year the incredibly long-lived slant six engine was to emerge
on production lines
This was also the year when Plymouth as a brand peaked. It held third place behind Ford and Chevrolet, with some 458,261 sales. A good part of the credit for that number (23,867) belongs to the Sport Fury. Over 17,000 hardtops were built, though the survivor numbers are low.
Some collectors prefer to chase the 1958 (marginally more conservative styling) because of the connection to
Christine the movie, but for many it’s the 59 that represents the pinnacle.
Plymouth had subtly shuff led the market positioning of the Fury name over the years, from being at the sports car end of the spectrum – it built a big performance reputation at Bonneville in 1956 – to a more mainstream luxury family performance car. The year Daniel’s example was built, there were several variants carr ying a Fury badge and two key Sport Fury models: soft and hard top.
Chrysler had gone to enormous lengths a few years before to rework the look of their range into something that was longer and lower to the eye – which Plymouth benefited from. Among most significant developments was the torsion bar front end, which enables the designers to get the engine and entire profile lower. It may not sound like much now, but at the time (as we mentioned in part 1 last issue) it came as a shock to its competitors, most notably GM.
Typically for the period, you could