|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Activities
Nor'easter News
Car Care
Membership
Other Cool Stuff
Sponsors & Advertisers
|
Porsche
Club of America
Four
Speeds & Drum Brakes
|
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||
The days are finally getting longer and while we still have a couple of Ice Races left I'm happy to leave winter behind. Old guys, old cars and old man winter just don't seem like a great combination. On the flip side it is nice to look forward to all the outdoor activities. My son, Rob out in Phoenix, tells me of his great mountain rides on his new (new to him) 600 cc rice burner with his buddies. Bright sun, eighty degrees and 120 horsepower on two wheels, what adventure! To me a hundred horsepower has always seemed like a lot of muscle to have in any vehicle. What a difference a generation makes in the automotive world. When I started my journey the motorcycles of the time were putting out 25 hp and the cars were trying to reach 100 hp. Actually, the Lambretta 150 cc motorscooter that I started with was certified to produce only 5 hp. That was so that a fourteen year old could ride one with a learners permit in Florida. If it was over that magic 5 hp number you had to wait another year. By then I was in the big leagues with a '58 VW that was putting out 36 hp. Just think about that for a minute, there is more grunt in most garden tractors today. With so little power how could I have been stopped for speeding so often? 50 in a 35, 40 in a 25, with a car that took almost 20 seconds to get to sixty and that was only on level ground. I can't imagine the trouble I would've gotten into if I had a car with real power. We sure learned some skills that most drivers never have occasion to use with modern cars. Kids of the day learned all about momentum and how to use it. Driver education was rat racing on Friday nights. That was where you would go out with a couple of friends looking for someone to chase or someone that wanted to chase you. It was seldom a stranger and in many cases it was just another rematch from the week before. With no horsepower on tap the idea was to always keep your speed up. In other words, don't lift. A lot of the roads in residential areas were dirt with no curbs, perfect for driving with your right foot down. By just throwing the wheel without lifting the car would scrub off enough speed to make it, or not. If you weren't going to make it the solution was to just drive up onto the yard until the car was straight and then just steer back onto the street. There were never any tracks left because the VW was so light it just skimmed over the stiff Florida grass and there wasn't enough power to spin the tires so you weren't going to leave a streak like the big boys. Our high school group was made up of a bunch of underpowered imports that included a Morris Minor, a Sunbeam, a couple of VW's and a Renault Dauphine. I don't think that all together they came up to 100 hp. As you would expect we developed a favored route that would see action a couple of weekends a month. I guess that we didn't really think about the people that lived in the houses that we passed at a high rate of speed in the middle of the night. Like the song says "I knew what I was feeling, I don't know what I was thinkin'". In Florida in the 60's a lot of the retired folks took great pride in their yards and spent a lot of time working on them. This was well before anything like Scotts Turfbuilder was even invented. One such fellow who lived on a corner lot, a big corner, lot took great exception to our night runs and would yell all kinds of terrible things from his front porch as we rounded his corner. That was really too bad because he had a really great corner, it was wide open and a little off camber, enough to make it exciting at 30 mph. One of my classmates had an old Ford like the one that James Dean drove in "Rebel" where he put his left hand through the vent window to grip the wheel. Really cool. The Ford was easy to catch and no problem to get away from but we let him play because it was lowered in the back, looked cool and with a set of open Lakes pipes, made a lot of noise. He would rumble through the neighborhoods just to wake people up. One night after being yelled at by the old guy on the corner he suggested that we go back to that perfect yard to leave a few marks so the guy really had something to complain about. It didn't seem like the best idea that I ever heard so I went home but the back on the course to that favorite corner. The '49 Ford rolled into the front yard and sat in the grass with those chrome pipes roaring as the owner came to the door. When the yelling started the rear tires started to spin, leaving two big strips heading for the street. This mean ride had a column mounted shifter and as driver popped it into second gear and sidestepped the clutch the rear universal on the drive shaft said good-by with a bang. He was sitting in the yard at the scene of the crime when the police arrived with his hand still in the vent window, looking cool. There was no arrest or trial just what we would now call community service. That was an entire summer of free lawn care for the old guy on the corner. Yard work isn't a skill that you normally associate with the automotive world but everything was a learning experience back then. Another long forgotten talent is passing another car on the highway. The Interstate highway system pretty much eliminated cross country travel on two lane roads and modern cars have so much power available that things like depth perception, judging closing speeds, and timing are no longer needed. All a driver needs to do is pull out, punch the gas pedal you've passed the car ahead. Just think about all the different factors at work when a 36 hp VW needed to pass another car doing fifty miles per hour on a narrow two lane road. The time needed to increase the speed from 50 mph to 60 mph was measured in minutes not seconds, so you definitely needed to take a run at the car ahead. That meant at least a mile of clear road was required and down hill was preferred. It took a lot of practice to be able to judge closing speeds but I have to admit many calls were made based on the type of car approaching. Calls which were not always accurate. Pickup trucks with a line of cars trailing behind were assumed to be under the speed limit but single cars closing could be tougher to judge. There was only a couple of seconds to make the call because if the pass was to be executed correctly you were already closing rapidly on the rear bumper ahead and needed to do something, either pull out or hit the brakes. Most of the time it was pull out because even if it was close you didn't want to wait another couple of miles to take run number two at the car ahead. Besides all the cars behind would see you hit the brakes and that would have shown them your poor judgment. When it was close the approaching car would blow the horn and the driver would shake their fist. When it was really close they would drive into the dirt, what we now call the shoulder, throwing rocks and gravel into the air, showing drivers in both directions that your passing skills needed work. I believe that one of the reasons that so many people pull out in front of us from side streets is because they are no good at judging the closing speed of our approaching car. They don't need to be because all that horsepower will save them. What we need is a lot less horsepower and a lot more practice. They need to spend some time on a two lane road with a dotted line between them and the car they're passing and an eighteen-wheeler closing with both stacks belching black smoke and no shoulder to dive to. That would be a learning experience. Either that or we would quickly lose some poor drivers. It's a really good thing that our cars are a lot safer today because our drivers certainly aren't. Driver training late at night just isn't what it used to be. KTF |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright
1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005
PCA/NER
Year 2000 Web Site Design by www.sitesofboston.com |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
