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

[Ken Pepke]

Well put Tony ...

There is little in motor sport performance available today that can match the excitement of launching a 3000+ pound mussel car and keeping it on the edge of tire traction for the whole quarter mile!  Even on modern tires it takes finely honed driver skill.  Future tire development may allow those old timers to dip into the 10's or better ... bone stock.  13 seconds in a FWD vehicle that is limited by the engine?  How droll.  Drivers that get excited about that would have to hire a real driver to even see old mussel car kind of performance. 

Imagine how it would have felt to have been on a skid pad with a '63 Corvair and turning at .72 Gs ... on 6.50-13 bias tires!  No other stock car of the day could match that but upgrading tires would not have helped as the car could do that at wide open throttle.  Wonder what G-force a 180 turbo on modern tires could develop?  Now that would be exciting!

Ken P
Wyandotte, MI
Worry looks around; Sorry looks back, Faith looks up.

**********************

> From: Tony Underwood <tony.underwood at cox.net>
> Date: November 2, 2011 1:03:41 AM EDT
> To: virtualvairs at corvair.org
> Subject: Re: <VV> Apples and Oranges - "Dull" cars No Corvair.
> 
> 
>> 
>> 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..