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As the years pass by with increasing speed it interesting to remember back when cars weren't so capable and we measured them with a different yardstick. Until I went off to college the fastest car I ever rode in was a '57 Chevy Bel Air that was owned by a friend’s mother. It was new and very shiny with bright red paint and a red plastic interior. My friend had convinced his mother (I don't remember a Dad in the picture) that the car should be a standard shift so it came with what we called three on the tree. It was the same column mounted shifter that we had seen James Dean shift so smoothly in "Rebel" and we knew that we could be as cool as he was in the movie. The real trick was in the execution of a first to second shift. It needed to be done with a real straight arm sorta like fending off a tackler in a football game. That was in part so that everyone watching could see that you were changing gears and be ready for the squeal of rubber when the clutch was dropped. I have no idea what kind of zero to 60 times this car could do, it was an in-line six cylinder after all, but I will never forget that when that Chevy hit second gear under full throttle it was impossible to reach up and touch the metal dashboard. My introduction to flat out acceleration was out on Patrick St in Kissimmee, FL heading to the night drags. I didn't know anybody that had a watch, let alone a stopwatch. We were just interested in who could beat who from a standing start. The night drags were held out on the runway after the airport was closed for the night. It was dark and except for a few flashlights and there was no communication between the start (usually a girl waving a scarf) and the two cars with headlights pointed across the runway a quarter mile away. We all watched from the finish line because if you weren't down there you would never know who won. It wasn't until the ad campaign for the 1965 Triumph TR-4 that touted a zero to sixty time of 10.5 seconds that we all started to pay attention to speed. Ten point five was just an amazing number back then. That was also about the same time that those of us with those funny little foreign cars began to talk about handling. With a Morris Minor, a Renault Dauphine and a VW beetle in our group we were hoping that we could just get to sixty, never mind how long it took. Suddenly the first columns that we looked at in the road tests were the 0-60 times. When the times started to get into the six or seven second range we knew that it was really fast. Little did we realize how fast cars would become as the years rolled along? Now day’s minivans are under ten seconds and most four door sedans are well in to single digits. The real cars are under six seconds, even four wheel drive stuff, and the Speed Channel recently showed a production Mitsubishi that was just a shade over two! The current launch sequence on a F1 car will match that in two but if that sounds fast you didn't see the interview last week when John Force said that his funny car gets there in one. Yes, that's right, in one second. I think that falls under the discussion about someone always being bigger, faster, richer, etc. Now that we realize that we're not going to be the fastest person on the block maybe it's enough just to be distinctive. You can do it with a new car every couple of years or you can do that with an older car that just looks new. The new car route starts to get expensive real quick. Thirty percent off the top as you drive away from the dealer, Five percent more to the RMV at tag time. Another five percent trailing you on an excise tax bill at the end of the calendar year. About another 4%-6% of value on your insurance bill depending upon how low profile you've been with the local police recently. So my math tells me that you're smiling to friends in front of your new ride while you're out approximately 45% of the purchase price one way or another. All the while the next car down the street is going to be faster off the line that what you just bought. And you're complaining about the price of gas? Stick with the old stuff. You won't see yourself coming around every corner and it really isn't all that tough to keep it up. Besides once you get to sixty in a few seconds in a new car then what do you do? Like we've always said, it's more fun to drive a slow car fast that drive a fast car slow. KTF |
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