From: ac579@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (G.C.J. Timm)
Subject: Re: Re: Sentra E vs. Saturn SL (SE-R & SC)
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, (USA)
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 92 20:42:44 GMT


 
In a previous article a young pup, still damp behind the
ears where his mommy licked him, name of TOM STEEGMANN
says: 
>>G.C.J. Timm (that's me folks) writes...
>>Speaking from some experience with muscle cars in the
>>60's, the Shelby Mustangs were the best of a bad lot.
>>BUT, they were NEVER well balanced, sophisticated, or
>>refined. 
>>Any econobox of today has better brakes, suspension, and
>>especially TIRES, than any muscle car of the '60's.  As
>>for engine power, I would like to see a genuine Shelby
>>Mustang, vs. a Sentra SE-R at Nelson's Ledges......
(That's Nelson's Ledges as in "The 24 Hours of..")
>What about a 67 L88 vette? Or any of the injected small
>block or carbed big block vettes? Their brakes were 4
>wheel disk with multiple pistons for every caliper. These
>could stop faster than almost ANYTHING made since then
>(except for newer vettes and porsches). They could waste
>any jap econobox on any kind of road course, or any other
>race for that matter. I'm pretty sure it could beat the
>300zx in the slalom. As far as suspension goes, how does
>4 wheel independent grab you? There were some American
>Muscle cars of the day that had that feature that was
>"foreign" to the Japanese until recently. How about
>0-100-0? No car has ever beat the cobra's sub 13 second
>performance in that. Check your facts before you go
>shooting your mouth off next time.
In the immortal words of Elmer Keith son, "Hell I WUZ
There!"
 
The Corvette street machine didn't have disk brakes until
1965.  When Chevy shoehorned the 396 into the Corvette,
they couldn't even fit in power steering, and had to play
hell with the front end dynamics to get the big block in!
 
And as for the Cobra, they were so rare that a rumor of a
factory racer showing up for a second rate car show and
autocross brought people from 80 - 90 miles away just to
see the beast run!  (And then he got his tail whipped by a
full race Yenko Stinger (TM)  That was a heavily modified
Chevy Corvair, advertised by a lady named Donna May Mimms,
a platinum blond in pink, think she was heavily modified
too.)  In most SCCA regions of the day you could show up in
a 289 Cobra and win A Production walking away!  And let's
face facts boy, the Cobra was a racing car in street
clothes, just built to make the numbers necessary for a
production qualification for FIA Homologation and Ford and
Ferrari argued for years that the other was cheating on the
number of cars produced!  And never, ever forget, good men
died in those cars because the engine power far exceeded
chassis design and tire development.  The 289 Cobra was
intended for a low power 6 cylinder sedan engine.  The
upper suspension members were transverse leaf springs and
the joke of the day was that the springs, shocks and sway
bars were so stiff that the only suspension travel left was
chassis flex!
 
I would be willing to bet cash money that there is more
Computer Aided Design in the nozzles of the paint sprayers
on the Taurus line in Atlanta, than there was in the entire
Ford racing program.
 
Never Forget Tires.  The hot setup of the '60's was the
belted bias ply tire.  A pony car or muscle car would eat
a set of tires in six months if you pushed it.
 
And speaking of the beasts:
 
Pony car:  A compact car chassis with a sporty looking body
and a V-8.  (But the big 3 and the little 1 sold more with
I-6's than they did with V-8's)
 
Muscle car:  An intermediate chassis with a coupe body
(sometimes convertible) and a big engine.
 
The muscle car had better front/rear weight distribution
than the pony car and dominated the drag strips.
 
Disk brakes were still an option on these cars and most of
the drag racers didn't order the disks because of drag,
which might have cut a hundredth of a second or two off
their time.  The goal of the muscle car was to E.T. under
14 seconds.  Things had gotten so bad by 1968 that the
Pontiac GTO came with a 4.11 final drive ratio and had a
top speed of 98 miles an hour.  The only course a 1968 GTO
was ready to run was 1320 feet long, flat and straight.
 
Handling had fallen off so far by the late '60's that The
Late Great Uncle Tom McCahil (Inventor of the road test and
the 0-60 standard) ran a '46 Ford Sedan (subject of the
First ever Road Test) against a 1966 Ford Fairlane GT at
Daytona.  The Fairlane took him on the straights and on the
oval, BUT he caught up on the infield, a tight little
saddle which was dead flat.  And don't even ask about the
Pony Cars with 400 plus cid V-8's.  They were just a very
bad joke, and fortunately very rare.
 
Despite what you have read in the monster car rags, top of
the line machinery was rare.  For every 426 hemi there were
hundreds of 383's.  Super 'vettes and Cobras cost as much
as a house and the number of people who could plunk down
that kind of money for a toy were even more rare then than
they are today.  The dividing line for "Performance" and
regular cars was pretty much a 0-60 of 10 seconds, as a
general rule of thumb.  And now days an econo box with
skinny tires can do that off the showroom floor.
 
Ah what's the use, in the immortal words of Foghorn
Leghorn, "That boys sharp as mud and half as bright!"
 
Jeff
Who still likes cars, still likes to drive, but doesn't
look back with rose colored bi-focals.