If it were pure handing I was after I’d buy an Evo8,that looks like a kick in the pants actually(especially at around 1:12)
Sam never said he was after pure handling; he said the Camaro will handle better than a Mustang, and he’s right. I was originally going to list this as another one of the reasons the Camaro will have the edge on Mustang, but then I’d have to go and list all the rest of the reasons and I didn’t want to be mean.
I used to like the Mustang a lot more than the Camaro, but the tables will most certainly be turned in 2009.
OK.
The Camaro handles better? So does the Evo8,Thanks for that tidbit of info,I’ll stick with the Stang thank you.
The Camaro may or may not win on an open-track road course.But as a Musclecar fan/owner I know that my car isn’t going to be the best handling car on the road.
If handling were a high priority on my list for a car I wouldn’t buy a Camaro or a Mustang. The Evo8 or a Subaru WRX or [insert ‘X’] has both cars beat hands down in that particular department.
As for your speculation on the 09 Camaro,I hope the Camaro does do well.I always root for the underdog. 
I reiterate, the topic of the thread is muscle cars, not rally cars. It doesn’t matter if the Evo8 can dodge bullets … it’s off topic.
I was making a point.And my apologies I didn’t know you were a mod
A mod doesn’t care if a conversation goes off topic. They do, however, tend to get involved when people start getting personal …
You made your point, and it’s a handy one since most of us already know that rally cars turn better than live-axle muscle cars. Sam wasn’t forcing his handling opinion upon everyone, he was simply stating that Camaro will likely be the best-handling muscle car due to superior technology. There are a lot of cars that will probably do certain things better than Camaro as there is no perfect car; compacts will get more fuel economy, trucks will haul more cargo, sedans will haul more people, and AWD rally cars will get more traction. That doesn’t make any one of them better than the other. None of those, however, will ever be relevant to a domestic muscle thread. If it were solely on the subject of car handling, I’m sure there would’ve already been several opinions on the superiority of rally cars well upthread by now, so take the self-evident rally pride down a notch.
Whos getting personal?Im not forcing my opinion down anyone throat either.But I am ‘voicing’ it in response to Sam stone,thats what IMHO is about IIRC.
Did you miss this: “But as a Musclecar fan/owner I know that my car isn’t going to be the best handling car on the road.”- in my other post?
My point was this. I know some musclecar purists who would tell you that having a musclecar is less about handling (some would say it’s not about handling at all)
than it is about the sweet rumble of a 440 six-pack, or “cruising the strip”, the lines of a Roadrunner (or the “meep meep” horn of same), the paint job,the heritage, a good burn-out, etc.
Go tell a Superbee owner how good your Camaro handles.You’ll probably get the same response as I’ll give you, which is :rolleyes: “Yeah,ok so does an Evo8” Which is basically what I said in the first place.
-My Humble Opinion
Regards, TM (Mustang owner,Muscle car fan)
I don’t own a Camaro. And no, I didn’t miss you touting your interest in muscle cars. I actually read posts all the way through.
Considering Dodge didn’t exactly flood the market with Superbees, that may prove a difficult task, though I’d bet dollars to donuts that even a Superbee owner isn’t going to be so grotesquely stupid as to suggest the new Camaro isn’t cool because it handles better than a 35 year old Dodge, or even a brand-new Mustang. Any reasonable enthusiast wouldn’t be so prejudiced as you are to suggest that the Camaro won’t have a leg up on Mustang. In about a year, the Mustang is going to be the only car in America that still uses an axle derived from technology that was last seen on most passenger cars over a decade ago. Car buyers of today aren’t interested anymore, and if they want a live axle, they’ll probably go buy, well, a Superbee or Mustang. GM would rather they buy a Camaro, so the healthy business decision would be to build something modern that sells. The majority of the purchase base probably doesn’t give a shit about suspension so long as they get a better-handling car, and they’ll soon realize how much nicer the Camaro drives and let their dollars do the talking.
The absence of IRS on Mustang has only hurt its reputation in the press, although Ford would have you believe they’re still making them this way to appeal to drag racers (and, I suppose, “purists” like you) when in fact the live-axle enthusiasts represent a significantly small minority of the purchaser base, as in, below the 1% range. I think the truth is closer to the fact that they still can’t seem to figure out how to engineer and sell a Mustang with independent suspension for less than $30k, so they blame it on pandering to drag racers. Yeah, right. If they could have figured out how to make IRS a reliable and affordable standard, they’d have left the “track day purists” hanging out to dry a looong time ago.
Time will tell as to your pure speculation.
Wow,oookay
I’ll reiterate:
If it were pure handing I was after I’d buy an Evo8,that looks like a kick in the pants actually(especially at around 1:12)
Nobody buying the new Camaro is going to be expecting “pure handling”. Most people who buy even a fairly nimble car probably aren’t expecting “pure handling” either. If everyone who wanted “pure handling” got a car, then they’d all probably be driving the same car because only one could have the purest handling, but they don’t because we all have different tastes and different amounts of money to spend, and we don’t all live in a black and white world where every car is designed to be task-specific. Most people want something balanced … though I guess you live in the land of automotive absolutes where cars must put all their eggs into one performance basket and all owners are righteously indignant about which one is best suited to a specific task.
There are plenty of cars that have managed to move forward with independent suspensions and powerful engines while still remaining balanced, and that is exactly what GM wants to achieve by having Camaro benefit from better handling, not pure handling. Just because a performance car doesn’t match the handling benchmark of a tiny AWD rally car doesn’t mean it has to stay mired in technology that is generations old. Technology moves forward and improves cars as a whole … except perhaps at Ford. Still, you continue with the blowhard Evo response like I didn’t read it the first time. Granted, it didn’t even need to be said a first time, but wasn’t it Einstein who said that the definition of insanity was repeating the same thing over and over, expecting a different response?
So my ‘pure handling’ was the wrong choice of words.
All I’m saying is that the car you tout as “design perfection” on the one hand but would be “embarrassed to drive” on the other may well handle better. But it’s still gonna get its ass handed to it in sheer sales numbers by the Mustang. And again,time will tell…
The fact is, when the inevitable comparison tests come out between the Mustang and the Camaro, the lack of IRS on the Mustang is going to be a prominent fact that is going to cause it to lose points against the Camaro. And IRS doesn’t just help with cornering - it makes the car drive better and feel better on the road under all conditions. People who test drive both cars will notice it.
If the Camaro’s suspension is done really well, it may even find itself being compared to cars like the Infiniti G35, which would put it completely out of the Mustang’s league. Couple that with a fresh look while the Mustang will look pretty dated by 2009, and you’ve got the makings of a trouncing of the Mustang.
Of course, the Camaro could wind up going wrong in other ways and failing in the market (say, by winding up being priced up in the G35 range), but having IRS gives it a clear advantage over the Mustang.
And I agree that the Rally Car comment is kind of foolish. If someone said they were considering buying a BMW 330i because it handled better than a Lexus IS350, would you tell them that they’re crazy, because if they want handling they should buy a rally car? Can we never pick one car over another because of better handling, because wanting better handling should always push you into a rally car? That’s just silly. And I say that as someone who owns a Saab 92-x (WRX in Saab clothing). No, a BMW 330i won’t outhandle an Evo X. But buying a car is about choosing the right balance between the things you value, handling being just one of them. The point is that if all else is equal, the better handling car would be my pick. But with an Evo X/Camaro comparison, all else is not equal.
Whew, sure gotta a lotta riled up people here.
If you want to see how it’s going to go, looking forward, perhaps it’s best to look back first:
The Camaro has ALWAYS been the better performing car. Stock for stock, for every year it was available, the Camaro out accelerated, out cornered and out braked the Mustang.
And the Mustang outsold it handily. Why? Because it had a better V6 Secretary version. It was more livable day-to-day, it may even have been cheaper (I can’t back that up), but the reality is, for all our Testosterone chest thumping, 3 V6 Mustangs sold for every V8 Camaro speaks more or the bottom line than anything else.
The Camaro was hobbled by a NASTY chassis. There’s a hump in the passenger footwell to clear the exhaust, for as big as the car is, it’s got NO storage space. The Engine has to come out from the bottom. There’s a huge expanse of unusable space devoted to the angle of the windshield.
Give a non-enthusiast both V6 cars, and they bought the Mustang a heckuvalot more than the Camaro.
We want to talk performance absolutes? I have an STi, it’s a HOOT in all weather. It does not, however, compare to the Vettes. Can the STi be quicker? Yup. Can it go around a track faster? Perhaps. But the 383 in my 89 will stomp all over it at the streetlight.
But someone who only knows how Rice stacks up against Rice will still think the STi (or an Evo) is the be all end-all bestest ever. You have to dabble your foot in a bunch of different realms to get a good feel for what cars can do, and when you do, you realize something:
It doesn’t matter.
I built a car making 480 ft-lbs of torque…it can take a 250 hp shot of NOS to bring engine output up to about 550 hp…but I won’t, and it’s not worth it. When I built that motor, the crazies were making 850 hp…They’re now making 1100-1500hp with big motors and big hairdryers attached to them.
So no matter WHAT I built, there’s someone out there with bigger balls and a bigger budget.
But my car decisions make me happy, and someone will buy a V6 Mustang and be happy…
I hope they sell enough V6 Camaros to keep the lights on, cuz once upon a time, they couldn’t, and it didn’t matter that they made a faster car than Ford.
If you’re talking only about the last generation of Camaros, I agree. I actually purchased a Mustang in 1994 after look at the last-gen Camaro. The Camaro was just not a livable car. The windshield raked so steeply that it threw reflections like crazy. I’m 6’ tall, and it felt like the top of the windshield was right in my line of sight. I hated it. The catalytic converter hump in the passenger footwell was ridiculous. The low seating position made it harder to get in and out of, especially for a woman in a dress (my wife drove it).
The Mustang was much more livable. Upright seating, real back seats, lots of trunk space, good sound system, better interior quality, less ‘boy racer’, etc. So despite having owned a '67 Camaro and a 2003 Camaro and loving both, we passed on the last-gen Camaro and bought a Mustang.
But the Old 67-69 Camaros were much more like modern mustangs in that they had real back seats and trunks and an upright driving position. And they sold very well. As did the next two generations of F-bodies. If the new Camaro has the seating position of a '69, it’ll sell very well. If it feels like Corvette-light, it won’t.
I see some of the appeal of the Corvette “car is wrapped around you” fit, but it’s not something that I would want in an everyday car. It’s one of the reasons that I wasn’t a huge fan of the most recent Camaro.
Does anyone know if they’re planning to relaunch the Firebird?
Not sure if you guys saw but they posted pricing and production pics of the new Challenger. Over 6,000 people have put down deposits on it already without even seeing the car. But I guess it will be on the streets pretty soon! It’s nice to see some definites on the car and the pics look awesome!