Imagine an afternoon of quarter-mile races between the baddest U.S. muscle cars of the 1960s - 1970s ('66 427 Cobra, 1969 Roadrunner, 1970 Hemi Cuda, 1970 Chevelle SS454) versus today’s fastest and most furious. Which would win?
Have technological refinements rendered the American muscle cars of the 1960s and 1970s underperforming leviathans? In answering, let’s NOT compare exotic Euro muscle cars, such as the F1, Lambourghini, Ferrari, etc.
> Would using modern tires much help the old muscle cars?
I submit this chart, for your inspection. Not sure if it’s authoritative.
Muscle cars weren’t all that fast all things considered. Their engines sounded badass but it was mostly show and much less go. There are lots of modern cars that can beat any on your list by a very good margin.
The Corvette Z06 for example blows the doors off the #1 car on your list coming in at 11.5 seconds in the quarter mile versus 12.20 for the 1966 Cobra.
As you move down your chart past the first few places, the badass cars of the past put in yawn inducing performances by today’s standards. For example, BMW M3’s can beat most of the cars on the list as well and I wouldn’t call them exotics.
Not even close. You don’t even need to look at muscle cars today to find cars that are faster than anything that came out of Detroit in the 1960’s-70’s. The new Mustang GT-500 has 500 HP. The Corvette Z06 has 500 HP. Dodge/Chrysler is building half a dozen vehicles with 425 HP. BMW, Mercedes, and Audi’s flagship sports sedans are all well over 400 HP, and a couple are over 500 HP.
And this is SAE horsepower, measured at the wheels. The HP ratings in the 60’s were net HP at the flywheel, without drivetrain and accessory losses.
What those big engines had going for them back then was torque. Gobs of it. But the cars weren’t very good at using it. They had crappy tires and suspensions, and were traction limited. Today’s cars have modern tires, traction control, and in some cases All-Wheel-Drive. Take the Subaru WRX STi. This is a compact sedan with four seats and a real trunk, which does 0-60 in 4.6 seconds with 300 HP. I don’t believe there was a muscle car around in the 60’s that could touch it off the line, simply because the Subaru has AWD.
Hell, even average sports sedans like the Infiniti G35 and the Lexus sports sedans are pushing 300 HP or more and flirting with 5 second 0-60 times. If you go back and read the road tests of some of those old muscle cars, you’ll find that the 5 second barrier was a very tough nut to crack because of their traction problems.
The fastest cars ever built are being built right now. This is the new muscle car era, 21st century style.
The newer Ford Mustang Cobra also destroys all of the old muscle cars with a 12.9 quarter mile time. Handling on virtually any new car built for performance is superior to the old muscle cars as well. The only place where the muscle cars still excel is engine noise.
Aside from the quarter-mile times, there’s just a ton more useable performance nowadays. Plenty of cars will comfortably and safely cruise at the kind of speeds which the old supercars struggled to reach. A mercedes 300E taxi will do 120mph without any particular effort and let you natter with the driver at normal speaking volume. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the case with the old 70’s big-blocks.
Although it’s probably in the steering and stopping departments that things have changed the most. The subaru mentioned above would destroy any 70’s era car on a road with bends in it, as would almost any modern car with sporty pretensions.
As an aside, if you permit hot-rodded performance variants, you MIGHT still have a fight.
There’s a lot more room to hot-rod a 426 (7.1 Liter) Hemi making an advertised 425 HP than there is to hot-rod a Nissan 350Z’s 3.5L powerplant making an advertised 300 HP.
I doubt that’s what the OP really meant to ask, but I figured I’d toss it out there.
A lot of “average” daily driver cars these days like a V6 Honda Accord, Nissan Altima 3.5, or V6 Toyota Camary could match or beat most of the old muscle cars in 0-60 times. Most modern cars are lighter, have better horsepower/weight ratios, have computers optimizing fuel/air mixture and ignition, have fuel injection, are safer, handle better, and get better gas mileage.
Some examples:
2006 V6 Honda Accord
240 horsepower
0-60 in 5.9 seconds.
Yeah, a new Accord can smoke most old muscle cars. Not only that, but it will sip gas, turn better, stop better and be considerably safer.
I understand nostalgia; wanted something now that you lusted after in your youth isn’t strange. I totally understand aging Baby Boomers wanting to pick up a '67 Mustang.
What I don’t get is this odd insistence that this old technology is somehow better than newer technology. Cars are composed of, at a high level, two things: Technology and art. You can definitely make the argument that the art of cars from those days was at a higher level than car design now. What you can’t do is make the argument that the technology of that day was superior to today’s tech. I mean, I don’t see anyone making arguments that the Altair is a better computer than any random Dell desktop today. Why is it this way with cars?
Stay with the ideal that cars of that period were beautiful, and they remind you of your youth. Don’t try to make them into something they weren’t.
(FTR, my car, a lightly modded 1994, comes in somewhere between #1 and #2 on that list, going strictly by 1/4 mile times ;))
Nah. Today, you can slap a turbocharger on a lot of these new engines and pump the horsepower up tremendously. There are lots of Subarus running around with 500+ horsepower. Here’s a Stage III WRX STi that you can bolt on to a stock STi for $3500, that produces in excess of 600 HP, and which can run a 1/4 mile in 12.1 seconds on pump gas. My old '67 Camaro had a 425+ HP small block, and it cost a hell of a lot more than that to get that kind of power out of it. And I still had to deal with detonation problems, even on premium gas with octane boost and water injection, and the chassis of the car had a hell of a time managing the power.
I hear you, but at least the old muscle cars sounded like muscle cars. A lot of the late Japanese imports sound like hell when the turbocharger kicks on and off–some kind of popping sound. That said, the new Mustangs sound great…
BTW, some posters have said the old muscle cars had another advantage: They produced tons of low-RPM torque. Not sure how valid that is.
I am sure they did but the fact still remains they would lose in every category today. The quarter-mile is the race you asked about and the one muscle cars would fair best in because they are meant to go straight ahead very fast. They still get beaten and generally very badly by a wide variety of modern cars. It is even worse if you talk about a race where the suspension, steering, and braking are a part of it. There is much more to performance than just slapping the biggest motor you can find an an unsophisticated frame and tires and trying for a brute-force approach. Low-rpm torque is fine but the real goal is to get moving quickly and boiling the tires at the starting line may look cool but it costs time.
You’re also forgetting a feature modern cars have that cars back then didn’t have: traction control. Admittedly, a good driver could probably do better on a car without traction control in the quarter mile than one with traction control, but the average driver only has to stomp on the accelerator and get a better 1/4 mile time than the average driver could get on one of those old cars where the problem wasn’t horsepower, but getting that horsepower to the ground with slippery, narrow bias ply tires.
A reliable way to contrast the old and new…or any two cars…is compare the power to weight ratio.
A Honda Accord has a better power P/W than a Mercury Marauder, and thus can win the race.
Furthermore, if you compare stock tires from a 60s era muscle car to a modern auto, you can see how much wider today’s rubber is, thus more contact patch to transfer acceleration.
Also, today’s cars are much more aerodynamic. Then, the coefficient of drag was in the .35-.40 range, today’s cds are often below .30
I recently read a newspaper article about a Mustang collector whose '66 or '67 big-engine Mustang was turning just about the same times as the period advertising offered. in other words, despite being old, it was still healthy.
The old muscle cars didn’t typically use “narrow bias ply tires.” At least, they typically weren’t narrow. They were fat and often had the characteristics of slicks, didn’t they? (Before my time) Anyway, I specified in the OP, I think, that we’re comparing the old muscle cars outfitted with modern tires.
A couple of other posters, Shaggy among them, mentioned the tendency of the old muscle cars to sit spinning their wheels, because they lacked traction control. But anyone with any racing experience knows better than sitting their at the green light, spinning his tires. Wouldn’t the better way be to hit the gas, but not enough to “boil” the tires? Once you get traction, THEN punch it.
