Q: I'm an all American Muscle Car type of girl. Put a 67' GTO in front of me and I'm in ecstatic orgasmic bliss for hours to come =) But it seems that the American Muslce Car is becoming more and more difficult to find. I'm not talking about those new things with 40 billion electronic gadgets where when one thing goes wrong it becomes a chain reaction and EVERYTHING goes wrong. I'm talking about classic. I'm talking about those cars nicknamed "tanks" because you can ram them in the back but you're the one who's car is totalled while the Muscle barely has a scratch. Yeah. Good ol' things =) Now my question is this: What's happened to these priceless gems? Are they being replaced with eruopean and asian match-box cars? Those little cracker-jack toys seem to have good handling and torque but if it's just a straight-way half mile race, HA! But honestly, what's goin on with these orgasmic-classic cars? Have Japanese Toys taken over the world?! Lol ok besides gas prices. I'm talking about show cars. Races. Yada yada. lol gents, I work at a dealership for Jaguar Porsche and Audi aswell as pre-owned BMW, Corvette, ect. You get the picture, I know the power but in all honesty, unless it was just for joy rides and wasn't long term, I would personally NEVER buy a Jag or Audi. They break down far too easily (post 2001 cars).
A: The classic muscle cars wete wonderful to look at, but in terms of raw performance, their modern equivalents can almost always put them on the trailer. The GTO is a perfect example. It generated great straight-line numbers when it was new. But the Australian-engineered GTO of a few years ago, when equipped with an LS-6 and manual trans, would post superior times at the drag strip and skifdpad, and gret better fuel economy while doing it. The 1967 version rode on bias-ply tires that would melt before hooking up. Weak brakes and suspension kept drivers from exploiting much of its power, anmd the atrocious aerodynamics probably chopped 15-20 mph off the top end. Plus, parts like the 4 bbl carb needed much more attention to produce peak performance than a modern fuel-injection system. And those old cars may have survived crashes more readily, but the drivers didn't. Reports of motorists being impaled on their steering columns were all too frequent. It's OK to love muscle cars for their bodies. But as far as performance, these are the good old days.