<VV> Apples and Oranges - "Dull" cars No Corvair.

[Tony Underwood]

>
>There  are two FOUR DOOR japanese cars that will
>pretty much blow the doors off  almost any "muscle car" from the 60's or
>70's.  The cars I'm referring  to are the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution, and
>the Subaru WRX STi.  The  Evo has been shown to run low to mid 13 second
>quarter mile times BONE  STOCK, and the Subaru comes in in the mid to high
>12's bone stock.   These are FOUR door cars that very handily do double duty
>as a grocery  getter/family car.
>
>Compare that to 14.4 seconds for a 69 GTO Judge, 70  Chevelle SS LS6 at
>13.7,
>and a 70 Hemi Cuda at 14  seconds.





Once again I'm compelled to casually remind people of just how those 
1960s road tests were performed... with a lot of wheelspin.   NObody 
at those magazines knew how to launch a car.   They also did all 
those tests with street cruising bias ply tires with contact patches 
not much larger than your hand.   Stick some respectable rubber under 
a '70 Hemi-Cuda that's running right (as in no lead-fouled plugs and 
timed correctly) and see what sort of times you get when you learn 
how to manage nearly 500 hp.   Even at almost 3900 lbs it will yank 
your head back onto the headrest if you get serious with the 
right-side pedal.    It's not terribly difficult to cut almost 2 
seconds off a quarter-mile time if you could just get one of those 
musclebound '60s cars to hook instead of sitting at the line making 
white smoke.


By the way:   Since when is a stock WRX a 12 second car?   And what 
does the number of doors have to do with anything?   There was a 
record holder Pro-Stock drag car during the '70s that had 4 doors.


Incidentally, a '70 e-body (cuda-challenger) Mopar with a smallblock 
could turn a 14 second quarter easy.  Gear it right and put sticky 
tires on it and it knocks loudly on 13's door.   I suspect one with a 
Hemi could do a little better than that...  Hell, my 426 '66 
Satellite could manage 12s in street tune and it weighed 3900 lbs 
with me in it (and still wanted to turn tires into vapor).    If you 
give a vintage musclecar the same tire advantage that modern cars 
easily enjoy, and make sure that the old vintage warrior is properly 
tuned, it will give a much better account of itself than a lot of 
people are likely to admit.

Of course someone who goes out and spends 35,000 bucks for a car that 
turns a 13 second quarter will have a hard time admitting that a car 
over 40 years older with dinosaur technology and an all-iron engine 
and a grocery-getter body, all of which only cost 3600 bucks (a '68 
Hemi Roadrunner could be had for that) would run just as hard as his 
space age techno-rod.    I'll defend the 426 Mopar engine venomously...

Where else could you find a US made car engine that was able to make 
a dyno-tested 465 hp in streetable bone stock form and do over 300 
lbs/ft of torque from 1900 rpm through 6000 rpm, and nearly 500 
lbs/ft between 3800 and 4600 rpm?   Of course if you got serious and 
supertuned it a little, things improved a bit more.

All those engines from the '60s that got stuffed into musclecars 
would improve considerably with even minor mods.   Today's 
performance engines are just about maxed out straight from the box 
via very carefully designed engine controls computers and carefully 
configured fuel injection combined with cams that are precisely 
matched to the engine's design.   There's almost no room for any real 
improvement without some serious surgery to the hard parts.   Those 
old musclecar engines were certainly not exploited out of the box 
towards what they were truly capable of doing... not from the factory 
anyway... but a lot of people in their back yards, without the help 
of a computer, did just that.   It's how some of these cars ended up 
at dragstrips turning 11 second quarters at 125 IF they would 
hook.   There was a guy who lived a mile from mom's place who had a 
'63 Plymouth Savoy 2-door sedan with a Torqueflite automatic behind a 
Stage-II 426 max-wedge engine.   He raced it a bit in stock class 
dragracing and populated his livingroom shelves with trophies and 
time slips showing this old Plymouth turning high 10s (on cheater 
slicks).   This was in the early '60s.  Of course that Savoy body was 
light, but still...


Not a Luddite, just giving credit where it's due.   After all, isn't 
that pretty much the sort of thing that WE are all doing with Corvair 
engines?



tony..